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Brian Barrett Leah FeigerBusinessFeb 6, 2026 5:00 AMUncanny Valley: Tech Elites in the Epstein Files, Musk’s Mega Merger, and a Crypto Scam CompoundSeveral big names in tech turned up in the Epstein files. In this episode of Uncanny Valley, our hosts break down what it all means and catch you up on other big stories of the week.Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staf; Fabrice Coffrini/Getty ImagesCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyThis week, Uncanny Valley hosts Brian Barrett and Leah Feiger dive into the key tech industry figures who show up in the final batch of the Epstein files. Then, they discuss SpaceX and xAI’s blockbuster merger, and what it says about the future of Elon Musk’s companies. Plus, we share the story of how a whistleblower revealed—and fled—the inner operations of a crypto scam compound in Laos.Articles mentioned in this episode:The Tech Elites in the Epstein FilesElon Musk Is Rolling xAI Into SpaceX—Creating the World’s Most Valuable Private CompanyInside the ICE Forum Where Agents Complain About Their JobsHe Leaked the Secrets of a Southeast Asian Scam Compound. Then He Had to Get Out AliveYou can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.How to ListenYou can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how:If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too.TranscriptNote: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.Leah Feiger: Hey, Brian, how's it going?Brian Barrett: Leah, it's great. We missed you last week.Leah Feiger: I missed you guys, but hopefully you've had a lot of time without me to catch up on all cultural things happening in the United States of America right now. The Melania documentary. Have you seen it?Brian Barrett: No. I have not seen it. I had a hard time getting a ticket.Leah Feiger: Oh, no.Brian Barrett: No. That's not true. That's not true. So no Melania. I'm excited for the Olympics coming up.Leah Feiger: Yeah. That's going to actually be way better. I think it's ice skating for me or bust.Brian Barrett: I'm going to try to convince you and Zoë to let me do a whole episode on the biathlon.Leah Feiger: I'm in. Wait, the biathlon. No, I'm not in.Brian Barrett: No. Get in, Leah, all the more reason to do the episode.Leah Feiger: I want to do an episode on the Olympics, period. That's actually very interesting to me. Again, my section will be ice skating. I'm really sad to tell everyone that Zoë is not here with us this week, but she did leave a treat for WIRED.com in the form of her review of the Melania documentary, and more specifically, all of the people that went to go see it. So everyone check it out, and don't miss Zoë too much. But should we get started? Should we get into this?Brian Barrett: Yeah. In the meantime, welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, senior politics editor. Brian, let's start off with the gift that keeps on giving for better, for worse, the Epstein files.Brian Barrett: Oh, what a way to phrase that.Leah Feiger: Is that not how we should talk about this?Brian Barrett: I don't know.Leah Feiger: This week, just to catch everyone up, there was a document dump of over 3 million files pertaining to everything Jeffrey Epstein, and it contains some really disturbing allegations, including torture and murder, really, really disturbing pictures and videos in the documents, so many emails, references to Trump, all sorts of things. I'm really excited to talk about this with you, honestly, because you wrote a story for WIRED all about the tech folks that got implicated in this most recent drop.Brian Barrett: I did. I spent way too much time reading way too many of these Epstein files just to look and see what was in there about specifically the tech billionaires. If you were to try to do all the people in tech that were in there, it would take you weeks or months. Truly, it's astonishing. But even with just billionaires, we've still got thousands of files referencing maybe about 10 or so that we found, and we sorted them, we broke it down by how many files each person was referenced in.Leah Feiger: You found 2,500 files alone associated with Bill Gates.Brian Barrett: Yes.Leah Feiger: What?Brian Barrett: Yes. A couple of caveats just real quick about all of these things, when we talk about all these people, those files represent some duplicates. They represent if Jeffrey Epstein was talking about somebody to someone else that'll show up. So it's not an exact figure. On the other hand, it's also only when their full names are mentioned. We know that Epstein referred to Bill Gates as BG in a lot of emails. So I think a couple of things stand out to me here, Leah.Leah Feiger: Yeah, hit me.Brian Barrett: One. Yes, there's a lot of Bill Gates. Gates has been on the record as saying he regrets his associate with Epstein. It's been widely reported for years, even before the first Epstein files release, that Gates was in there. Still more interesting stuff in there about that, but it more reaffirms what we know. What I was interested in more were some things that seemed relatively new. The tech billionaire who's in there the third most by our measurement was Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel, who I think there had been some reports that they had met maybe once or twice, but no, Peter Thiel is in over 2,000 Epstein files.Leah Feiger: He received political advice from Epstein. Epstein said that he wished he'd helped Peter Thiel with the Gawker suit.Brian Barrett: Yeah. I think as much as anyone else in there, Thiel seemed interested in taking a meeting, having lunch. At one point they go to Signal, which is where encrypted chats happen. At one point, Peter Thiel's assistant sent over Thiel's dietary restrictions list, which is quite expansive.Leah Feiger: It's an incredible, incredible list. We have another article on WIRED.com. Everyone go check that one out. I think the thing that gets me in so many ways, when I was looking through your story and all of the other excellent reporting on this drop, these are still people that have such an impact on our day-to-day life and day-to-day political life in the US and day-to-day tech life. Peter Thiel, cofounder of Palantir and eyes straight into Vice President Vance's office for all that we've been told. This is someone who decided that it was clearly and not just OK, but beneficial to be having these associations. And again, we don't know exactly what he knew or what all of these people knew at the time, but reading in between the lines, it's a real ... I guess what I'm saying is this isn't an issue of just 2016, this is an issue of right now.Brian Barrett: Well, and Leah, I'll actually disagree with you there. We do know what they knew to a certain extent in the sense that Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to sex crimes involving a minor in 2008.Leah Feiger: You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right.Brian Barrett: And the vast majorities of these conversations take place after that.Leah Feiger: Wild.Brian Barrett: I'll say too, a lot of the times, to your point, the defense comes up a lot. ElonMusk did this right? Where he's like, oh, it's taken out of context or, oh, I nevervisited the island.Leah Feiger: We got to talk about Elon Musk. His—Brian Barrett: We have to. In terms of out of context and never visiting the island, well, on November 25, 2012, Elon Musk wrote to Jeffrey Epstein: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”Leah Feiger: He's begging to attend. There's no other way to interpret this.Brian Barrett: He really wants to go.Leah Feiger: There's no other way to interpret this. And also specifically that language. “The wildest party.” Not even just like, “Oh, when is ... The wildest party?” There's so many different parts of this. That gag reflex. Absolutely.Brian Barrett: So the fact that the calendars didn't line up, sure, that gives you some plausible deniability, but if they had, you would've been right there. So it is really disappointing. I do want to say, not to defend anybody, but a lot of the names in there are circumstantial in a way, and I think the bigger point is that Jeffrey Epstein really wanted to be close to these people. He happened to be at a dinner party with Jeff Bezos, no indication that they ever talked, no indication, whatever. But still, Jeff Bezos winds up in the Epstein files hundreds of times just because Epstein was reading articles about him or at the same place that he was, so it is—Leah Feiger: Talking about him. Yeah. Absolutely.Brian Barrett: Yeah. It's just this web. It fills out this web.Leah Feiger: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, these are the tech titans.Brian Barrett: Yeah. Up until as recently as 2019, I think some of these people were actively in touch.Leah Feiger: Wow. So speaking of Elon, he was also in the news this week for an entirely different thing, aka rolling xAI into SpaceX, officially creating the world's most valuable private company. We’ve got to talk about that.Brian Barrett: Yeah. And I know that you love ... This combines your two favorite things.Leah Feiger: Oh, yes. Absolutely.Brian Barrett: AI and Elon Musk.Leah Feiger: Uh-huh.Brian Barrett: Leah, could I also interest you in a potential third favorite thing?Leah Feiger: Oh, hit me, Brian.Brian Barrett: Can I interest you in data centers in space?Leah Feiger: So that's what he's promising, right?Brian Barrett: Yeah.Leah Feiger: I'm actually very interested in data centers.Brian Barrett: Oh, good.Leah Feiger: Molly Taft, our wonderful climate reporter on the science desk, has entirely turned me around on how important it is to engage with them. I hate them, but I am very interested in them. So he wants to build a data center in space. What does that mean? What is a terrestrial solution? Please explain all of these things.Brian Barrett: Well, basically, yeah. So Elon Musk's pitch for combining SpaceX and xAI. And just to back up a second, SpaceX is Elon Musk's most mainstream, noncontroversial company, probably.Leah Feiger: It's his rocket company.Brian Barrett: Yeah. It's his rocket company. They basically have privatized NASA, partly because NASA gave up. Anyway ...Leah Feiger: No.Brian Barrett: The US space future really depends on SpaceX in so many ways.Leah Feiger: If Jeff Bezos is listening to this podcast, he's having just a true—Brian Barrett: Sorry, Blue Origin. Yeah. Oh, gosh.Leah Feiger: Internal.Brian Barrett: Terrible day. Blue Origin also there. So on the one hand, you've got this sort of future of US space travel, and on the other side you've got xAI, which is Elon Musk's AI company that keeps undressing women nonconsensually.Leah Feiger: And is also X, formerly known as Twitter.Brian Barrett: Yes. And now they're all going to be the same thing.Leah Feiger: Former Twitter employees, did they make a lot of money from this? What's happening? How are all of these companies now the same thing? None of this has relations to each other other than Elon Musk.Brian Barrett: So he would argue differently. And so the case that he would make is that in order for AI to get where it needs to be, wherever that is—faster undressing of more women—for it to get there, there's literally not enough energy on Earth to make that happen. So what you need to do is you need to go out in space and harness the energy of the sun to power AI. And who is really good at going out into space and harnessing things? SpaceX.Leah Feiger: Oh God.Brian Barrett: So we need to put SpaceX in service of xAI to make sure that we can harness the power of the sun, or as Elon Musk said, scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars.Leah Feiger: I'm getting this from your tone of voice, and we haven't had this legally approved or anything, but can we just call bullshit? It was also suggested that Tesla could merge with xAI and SpaceX. Tesla recently invested $2 billion in xAI. At that point this is basically all of Elon Musk's companies. You can talk about as sentient sun as much as you want, whatever that may entail. But this is just him combining all of his stuff together in one big pile and saying, I deserve as much money as possible from this. No?Brian Barrett: Yeah. There are parts that you can call if not bullshit you can raise your eyebrow really, really high on, and parts you can say, well, maybe this is Elon Musk's unified theory of the future. I was surprised by this. I have been deeply skeptical of data centers in space. As much as I like to say it, I think it actually is where we're going. I think that is a thing that is going to happen at some point, and SpaceX is in a really good position to do it. I do think, to your point though about all that intermingling: Look, SpaceX is a company that's really, really important to the US government because of that NASA thing. And so suddenly tying its fortunes into this pretty controversial AI company, suddenly making its mission to be more about powering that AI than getting to Mars or wherever, that's going to invite some regulatory concern. I think the US is going to take a closer look at this than they have taken a look at other Elon Musk projects because look, SpaceX has twentysomething billion in government contracts.Leah Feiger: I don't know. I like to think that the US government would be taking a closer look at this. I think as we know in so much WIRED reporting and other reportings out there, the regulatory bodies that are able to look at things like this have been slashed and dismantled, and a lot of yes, men put in charge. So I'm very curious about where these regulatory conversations and reviews go.Brian Barrett: And I'm curious too. SpaceX wants to IPO this year. Tesla stock is doing pretty well. But I think increasingly Elon Musk is betting it all on sci-fi, right? It's true.Leah Feiger: Yeah. You're absolutely right.Brian Barrett: Tesla is no longer a car company. He has made it very clear. Tesla is not a car company. Tesla is a company that sells humanoid robots, and we're going to put them in every home. Tesla is a company that is going to have driverless robotaxis in every city. So he's basically saying, look, all my companies right now are in service of what I think is going to happen, could happen, may happen in he would probably say two years. But when he says two years, it usually means five to 10 to never.Leah Feiger: I'm really waiting for the next commercial. Do you know where your child is? It's 10 pm. Oh, no, don't worry, they're with their humanoid robot and their driverless taxi.Brian Barrett: Yeah. They're playing Frisbee with optimists.Leah Feiger: So before we go to break, Brian, just to change this up a little bit, so many things happening in the US this week. We'd be really remiss to not at least briefly talk about a big WIRED scoop that just came out that the politics desk at WIRED got this week all about an online forum where ICE agents log on and complain about their jobs.Brian Barrett: Leah, this was a fascinating read from Tori Elliott, who spent some time lurking in these forums. And I think what stands out, maybe not surprisingly, but it is a reminder of they have the same workaday complaints that any group of people would have.Leah Feiger: Oh, absolutely. But it's a little more serious when an ICE agent is telling you that they're super tired and overworked and haven't taken a day off in a while because they're the ones with the gun.Brian Barrett: Yeah.Leah Feiger: Reading this was wild because I'm with you because on one hand you're going, OK, yes, we're all humans. We're all dealing with these things, and on the other, you're in charge of this right now, you're in charge of this massive surge. To back up a little bit, this forum of over 5,000 alleged current and former ICE and CBP officers has them venting about long work hours, limited overtime pay, incompetent leadership, poorly trained new recruits. A lot of these claims—I have to add as a fun little side note—a lot of these came in after ICE actually lost their union representation a few years ago because ICE accused the union of being too far left. No comment further required. To add, just as a little backdrop here, the forum doesn't require proof of employment, but it's a really interesting look inside of ICE's workforce, and it has a lot of information and very specific details that really only these people would know. Some of these quotes were wild. What stood out to you?Brian Barrett: What jumped out to me, the ones that really had that “woe is me” tenor, but also the ones that called the agency to task in a way that you don't see externally, at least. There's one quote, "led by some of the worst leadership I've ever witnessed from the local level all the way up to the national stage, this agency has managed to turn a righteous mission into a complete clown show." Now, you might agree with half of that. You might agree with the whole thing. I don't know whether it was ever necessarily righteous, but it is interesting to see how they are working through this. And to be clear, some of these people, when they make those complaints, they do get jumped on. I think there is a pretty active—Leah Feiger: Oh yeah. Lots of pushback.Brian Barrett: Yeah. Lots of pushback. Lots of people who are still very committed to the mission, still think it's pretty righteous.Leah Feiger: Honestly, the people talking about the mission and however these agents may feel about what's happening in Minnesota, what happened in Chicago, what happened in LA, and what appears to be getting ready to happen in different parts of the United States, what was really interesting to me was not even just their focus on their mission, but how they were about to go about it. There was one user who was saying they had just finished the Virtual Deportation Officer Transition Program, which they also said had been shortened, and they'd been transitioned to practicals like firearms training. And they wrote in the chat that the new agent kit had arrived on Friday, this big box full of body armor, gear, Glock, bunch of other stuff. But then they said that the process was wildly chaotic. They still didn't have access to GovTa, which is a system that the government uses to track workers' time and leave. They didn't have access to the electronic official personnel folder, which allows employees to access their own records. So basically, they're not actually getting fully onboarded according to posters on this forum, but they're still being handed a gun. This is wildly chaotic.Brian Barrett: Extremely. And Leah, did you see anything in their editorial, in her reporting, about the protests you mentioned in Minnesota or the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. Did they engage with that at all?Leah Feiger: Yeah. So they did, and a lot of the posts ... The posts have been happening for over a decade now at this point, but posts definitely have been heating up this month. A couple of days before Pretti was killed, a user started a thread ready to resign, had enough stress, and people were commenting on it and going back and forth. And I think that was when the quote that you mentioned came up, “led by some of the worst” people. And they continued on after that. We didn't find things of people going like, oh, this is horrible. This person was killed. It doesn't mean that it wasn't there. These are so many posts. But a lot of people posting are very concerned about ICE's image. They're very concerned by how this is coming across. They're very concerned about the chaos from the big things, noting these deaths, but also even randomly almost seemingly little stuff. This one quote I just can't get enough of, which is “I'm all for removing illegals, but snatching dudes off lawn mowers in Cali and leaving the truck and equipment just sitting there, definitely not working smarter.” It's just such a wild one, because it's someone going like, what is this chaos machine that I'm now part of? Whether or not we agree with any part of the sentiment.Brian Barrett: What I thought really was interesting too, in telling in the forum ... And maybe this doesn't play out across all of them, but it does say how long someone has been in the forum, which is a little bit of a shorthand for how long they have been in ICE and working with this organization. And you can see how if you have been doing this for a decade and you do think that there is a right way to do this, I think clearly we're in a world where that's not the way it's working anymore. So not to have sympathy for ICE, but it's at least interesting to see who's pushing back, how long they've been there when it's veterans versus people who just got there, which again, it gets back to also it's a workplace in some ways. It's a work environment. It's just one that is also a paramilitary force that is occupying US cities.Leah Feiger: Right. And honestly, a bird's-eye view is—as interesting as this article is and as juicy and telling as some of these quotes are, to my knowledge at least—there isn't any other reporting out there like this. This snapshot in time of what ice agents are talking about and going through. They're not really talking to that many other people about it. You have a couple of articles here or there. New York Times spoke to three ICE agents about what's going on. No. This is thousands. These are thousands of people talking about their day-to-day concerns with their jobs, with their bosses, with their coworkers, and with their mission. It's a snapshot in time that we're going to just have to keep looking at.Brian Barrett: And we will. Coming up after the break, we're going all the way to Laos in Southeast Asia to hear how a whistleblower was able to document and escape a crypto scam compound. Stay with us.Andy Greenberg: I was having a normal Saturday on the roof with my kids. They were playing in a kiddie pool.Brian Barrett: Last summer my colleague Andy Greenberg was enjoying an idyllic late afternoon in New York—Andy Greenberg:There had just been a rainstorm and there was a rainbow. It was a very beautiful evening. And I in typical terrible 21st century parenting style was ignoring my kids and looking at my phone and scrolling through messages.Brian Barrett: —in the middle of mindlessly scrolling between apps.Andy Greenberg: I've got this email. I found this email from someone with a pseudonym who is messaging me from the encrypted email service Proton Mail.Brian Barrett: The email is from an unnamed source who claimed to be a computer engineer in Laos.Andy Greenberg: A computer engineer trapped in a compound in the region of Laos who wanted to be a source, who wanted to be a whistleblower inside this crypto scam compound.Brian Barrett: As a cybersecurity reporter, crypto scams are Andy's bread and butter. That's what he's constantly tracking down. Trends in hacking and cybercrime. But crypto scam compounds are a beast of their own. These are places where scam operations happen at an industrial scale and crypto scams have become the most profitable form of cybercrime in the world, pulling in 10s of billions of dollars each year. Andy didn't know if this anonymous source was legit, but he followed up and told the source to message him through Signal. Later that evening, Andy received a flurry of messages.Andy Greenberg: They shared really detailed documents right off the bat, like an actual written report, a summary of everything they had experienced and everything about the way that this scam compound worked, including this very, very detailed flow chart that included some elements that I had never heard of before.Brian Barrett: These documents describe step-by-step the methods that this crypto compound uses to lure victims into their scams. From creating fake Facebook and Instagram profiles to using hired models and AI deepfake tools, all of it to create the illusion of a romantic prospect, something they call pig butchering.Andy Greenberg: The idea of pig butchering is that these are crypto romance investment scams.Brian Barrett: The operation starts with the scammer using social media profiles to convincingly take the identity of say, a wealthy woman.Andy Greenberg: A wealthy woman getting in touch usually with a lonely, very often older man and enticing them with some sort of intimate relationship.Brian Barrett: Trust is built through these video calls and constant back and forth messages.Andy Greenberg: The pig butchering part of this is that the pig is fattened up with this emotional connection, like somebody builds a real relationship with the victim until there's a lot of trust and intimacy.Brian Barrett: Eventually the scammer gives some financial advice to their mark.Andy Greenberg: And this wealthy woman says, “By the way, I can help you become wealthy too. It seems like you're having some financial problems and I can just refer you to the same crypto trading platform that I use, and you can easily double your money. It's a very safe bet. I'll walk you through it. In fact, I would be disappointed in you if you didn't try it.” And that process is incredibly effective it turns out. And only after weeks or months of that fattening up romantic process is the pig butchered.Brian Barrett: If you're wondering how someone could fall for that, you should know that the methods these scammers use take everything into account. Through documents shared by his news source. Andy learned that they use deepfakes to interact with their victims through video calls and AI chatbots to finesse their messages. They also make sure to match the scammers ethnicity with that at their target to avoid any language or cultural barriers. But the thing is, these operations don't just make victims out of their targets. Scam compounds lure workers, meaning the scammers behind the fake Facebook and Instagram accounts from Asian and African countries with legitimate job offers. Once they arrive at the sites, their passports are taken and they're essentially trapped and forced to become scammers.Andy Greenberg: A human trafficking operation that essentially enslaves people, tricks them into coming to this compound, turns them into forced laborers, traps them there and forces them to scam people for sometimes 15, 16 hour shifts. On one side, it's taking people's entire life savings very often, hundreds of thousands or even over a million dollars from victims in a single scam. But then on the other side, there are hundreds of thousands of enslaved people whose lives have been completely ruined as they're trapped in these compounds.Brian Barrett: The engineer who reached out to Andy is one of these workers trapped in Laos in a region bordering Myanmar and Thailand, where illicit operations are the norm.Andy Greenberg: The Golden Triangle, I've always heard about it as this kind of vague region at the intersection of the borders of Laos and Myanmar and Thailand that has been carved out as this special economic zone that is almost in an official sense, not controlled by Laos, but instead controlled by Chinese business interests. It is essentially run by Chinese, both business people and very Chinese organized criminal syndicates. This very small area, just like half the size of Washington, DC, or something, it is now a hub for all sorts of transnational crime and crypto scam compounds may in fact be the biggest and most lucrative form of those.Brian Barrett: And now it seemed the engineer who contacted Andy was willing to be a whistleblower for one of these compounds.Andy Greenberg: This was somebody who had been trapped like this and wanted to expose everything he could about the operation.Brian Barrett: Andy's trying to figure out if this guy is legit when he calls him out of the blue.Archival audio:Red Bull: Hello.Andy Greenberg: Hello.Red Bull: I'm fine. How are you?Andy Greenberg: Good. Good. Thank you for being willing to talk.Andy Greenberg: I picked up the phone and I'm talking to this young, very polite man with an Indian accent.Archival audio:Andy Greenberg: What is your name or what can I call you?Red Bull: You can call me from any name brother. No matter.Andy Greenberg: Oh, but you tell me just so I know how to talk to you and what name to call you. You can make one up if you like of course.Red Bull: You can call me Red Bull. OK.Andy Greenberg: Oh, Red Bull. Red Bull?Red Bull: Yeah. Yes.Andy Greenberg: OK. OK.Andy Greenberg: And I later found out that he was looking at an empty can of a Red Bull energy drink on the table in front of him when he said that. He was so motivated as a source, so driven that I was almost ... I was a little put off. I was wary of this person, and I quickly actually hung up and then called him back on a video call because I wanted to see who I was talking to. And he picked up with no hesitation and showed me his face on the video call. Showed me around the hotel room. He had actually managed to book a hotel room. And I asked him to show me out the window to walk outside the hotel. It was nighttime my time, but it was daytime there and he showed me the front of the hotel, which I could see that it was a Chinese language sign that there were palm trees and that it looked like a poor tropical area where everything was in Chinese, and that certainly sounded like the Golden Triangle to me. So I started to get what felt like confirmation very quickly that he was who he said and that he really was in a scam compound and that he was in the Golden Triangle.Brian Barrett: I think it's interesting too. I think when you hear about people and about people enslaved in these compounds, you don't really necessarily think that they have that amount of mobility, the ability to go rent out a hotel room, walk around on the street, take video, but it's a little bit of a different setup in terms of what's keeping them there. Is that fair to say?Andy Greenberg: I was also surprised. I had read reports of these scam slavery compounds where people are held in shackles and beaten every day and electrocuted in some cases, and they're held almost in the jungle in remote places. The Golden Triangle compounds are not like that. In part because the Golden Triangle itself is almost like a mega compound. The victims of these human trafficking operations, even if they walk around outside the building where they work, or even the dormitory where they live, their passport has been taken away. The police have very often been paid off by the compound mafia. They can't really leave regardless. So they have a surprising freedom of movement because the whole place is essentially like a closed circuit.Brian Barrett: A closed circuit where as the source Red Bull described to Andy, they had a strict work schedule and punitive measures.Andy Greenberg: They were actually paid, in theory, a salary of like $500 a month or so in Chinese Yuan. But then that money was taken from them almost entirely through fines for every tiny violation that their bosses could think of. They had access to a cafeteria where they were fed, but that food was withheld if they so much as showed up late to work or late to lights out in the dormitory. So there was this illusion of them being there voluntarily being paid a salary. They were even in theory, paid a commission on any scams they pulled off. But Red Bull was entirely broke. He had been scammed into absolute poverty, had no money. So it was a Orwellian thing where the bosses would give people these inspirational speeches as if they were part of some corporate sales force, like part of a car dealership or something. And in fact, they were absolutely forced laborers with no choice about what they were doing and who faced really brutal consequences if they ever broke the rules or tried to escape.Brian Barrett: It had been less than 24 hours since Red Bull had first made contact, but the details were quickly mounting up. He told Andy that they should involve law enforcement and that he was willing to work with an FBI handler. He specifically wanted to inform them about an upcoming in-person cash transaction that was happening on US soil and was related to one of the compound scams.Andy Greenberg: They were going to do an in-person pickup of cash with a courier. So Red Bull wanted me to arrange a sting operation to catch this courier and question this guy and he thought that that would be a big win against the scam operation.Brian Barrett: That's when Andy decided to reach out to Erin West, a former California prosecutor who now runs an anti-scam organization.Andy Greenberg: Erin thought there was no time to do a sting. She also said that any courier is super far down the hierarchy of a scam operation and it would not be a good idea. Also, she pointed out that that would call attention to the fact that there was a leak in the compound and could put Red Bull's life at risk. But then I asked her, what do you think about putting him in touch with an FBI agent, somebody to be his handler? Can you recommend somebody? And to my surprise, she suggested that I not do that either. She thought that the story I could produce with Red Bull as a source would be more important than anything he could give law enforcement. That in the best case scenario in years, what he provided might lead to the arrest of somebody low down in the org chart of a scam compound or possibly just charges in absentia for somebody who could not possibly be arrested or extradited from Laos from the Golden Triangle. As she put it, the cavalry is not coming. Nobody from Interpol or the FBI is going to march into this scam compound in the Golden Triangle and start arresting people.Brian Barrett: When Red Bull suggested that you organize a sting, which Andy, you are a incredibly gifted reporter, I believe that's not in your skill set necessarily.Andy Greenberg: Absolutely not.Brian Barrett: Not. But it was, I think, an indicator of something that we ended up talking about a lot throughout this reporting process, which is that Red Bull was not just willing, but at times very eager to take big chances.Andy Greenberg: Yeah. Red Bull was just remarkably risk-tolerant. Had so many dangerous ideas about what he wanted to do. He wanted to wear a hidden camera or hidden microphone, a button camera or some sort of watch with a recording device in it. He wanted to install spyware on his boss's computer. He wanted to set up a screen recording software on his work PC so that I could see what he was doing all day long. And I consulted with you about all these things, and then many other experts, and everybody told me one by one, these are not good ideas. This will get Red Bull killed. And I took that very seriously. And we didn't do any of that. I talked him out of all of those ideas. And what we ultimately settled on was a much simpler system that I still think actually turned out to be pretty effective, which was just that he installed a disguised version of Signal on his work PC.Brian Barrett: A disguised version of Signal. Basically, Red Bull installed the app on his work computer with a different icon, making it look like it was a shortcut to his hard drive.Andy Greenberg: And then we would talk with disappearing messages set to a very low time period so there was not much of a log if we were ever caught.Brian Barrett: Andy and Red Bull also took up aliases.Andy Greenberg: He would pretend that he was talking to his uncle. He would call me uncle from time to time just in case somebody spotted what he was doing.Brian Barrett: Some of those aliases were a little more embarrassing than others.Andy Greenberg: Eventually, we upgraded our cover story to me pretending to be his secret girlfriend, and we used a lot of heart emojis, but that was a little too cringey and we just couldn't keep it up.Brian Barrett: But the golden rule that stuck was how Andy and Red Bull would say hi to each other.Andy Greenberg: We created a protocol where when we started the conversation, the first person would say, Red, that the second person would say, Bull to make sure that his computer had not been seized.Brian Barrett: As their communication got into a rhythm, Red Bull filled in a very detailed map of the inner workings of the scam compound operation.Andy Greenberg: He sent me photos of a whiteboard that showed a leaderboard of who had scammed the most that month. He sent me a spreadsheet that turned out to be a floor plan of the whole dormitory and all the different workers there. He sent me a picture of this big Chinese ceremonial drum that was played for scams of a hundred thousand dollars or more. And then once in a while, he would then tell me to record my screen and turn on video on those calls, and then keep pretending to talk to his uncle as he walked around and videotaped and I recorded outside the compound, into the lobby of the office, sometimes into the cafeteria and once into the actual work floor, the office itself, where I could see the whole layout of the office and even colored flags on different teams desks to connote whether they had met their scam quota of revenue that month.Brian Barrett: As the weeks passed by, the wall started to close in on Red Bull. His team leader started asking questions about why he wasn't generating enough new so-called clients, and then he threatened him with a beating. At this point, Andy consulted with me and the other editors at WIRED. We decided that the safest thing was to stop the reporting process with Red Bull, at least until we knew he was safe.Andy Greenberg: I told Red Bull, let's stop. We got to stop. You gave me enough. Thank you. Let's just wait and we'll speak again when you are free and you're home, then we will talk again. But when I said this to him like that, we're done with our reporting process, he immediately in that conversation said, well, then I need to get out of here now. I'm going to find a way to escape.Brian Barrett: For the full story of what happened to Red Bull and the crypto scam compound he was escaping from you can head to WIRED.com. We promise it's worth your time. Thank you for listening.Leah Feiger: This episode was produced by Adriana Tapia and Tyler Hill. It was edited by Kate Osborn, Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Matt Giles and Daniel Roman fact-checked this episode. Mark Leyda was our SF studio engineer. Pran Bandi was our NY Studio engineer. Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director. Uncanny Valley: Tech Elites in the Epstein Files, Musk’s Mega Merger, and a Crypto Scam Compound This week, Uncanny Valley hosts Brian Barrett and Leah Feiger dive into the key tech industry figures who show up in the final batch of the Epstein files. Then, they discuss SpaceX and xAI’s blockbuster merger, and what it says about the future of Elon Musk’s companies. Plus, we share the story of how a whistleblower revealed—and fled—the inner operations of a crypto scam compound in Laos. Articles mentioned in this episode: You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com. How to Listen You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too. Transcript Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors. Leah Feiger: Hey, Brian, how's it going? Brian Barrett: Leah, it's great. We missed you last week. Leah Feiger: I missed you guys, but hopefully you've had a lot of time without me to catch up on all cultural things happening in the United States of America right now. The Melania documentary. Have you seen it? Brian Barrett: No. I have not seen it. I had a hard time getting a ticket. Leah Feiger: Oh, no. Brian Barrett: No. That's not true. That's not true. So no Melania. I'm excited for the Olympics coming up. Leah Feiger: Yeah. That's going to actually be way better. I think it's ice skating for me or bust. Brian Barrett: I'm going to try to convince you and Zoë to let me do a whole episode on the biathlon. Leah Feiger: I'm in. Wait, the biathlon. No, I'm not in. Brian Barrett: No. Get in, Leah, all the more reason to do the episode. Leah Feiger: I want to do an episode on the Olympics, period. That's actually very interesting to me. Again, my section will be ice skating. I'm really sad to tell everyone that Zoë is not here with us this week, but she did leave a treat for WIRED.com in the form of her review of the Melania documentary, and more specifically, all of the people that went to go see it. So everyone check it out, and don't miss Zoë too much. But should we get started? Should we get into this? Brian Barrett: Yeah. In the meantime, welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor. Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, senior politics editor. Brian, let's start off with the gift that keeps on giving for better, for worse, the Epstein files. Brian Barrett: Oh, what a way to phrase that. Leah Feiger: Is that not how we should talk about this? Brian Barrett: I don't know. Leah Feiger: This week, just to catch everyone up, there was a document dump of over 3 million files pertaining to everything Jeffrey Epstein, and it contains some really disturbing allegations, including torture and murder, really, really disturbing pictures and videos in the documents, so many emails, references to Trump, all sorts of things. I'm really excited to talk about this with you, honestly, because you wrote a story for WIRED all about the tech folks that got implicated in this most recent drop. Brian Barrett: I did. I spent way too much time reading way too many of these Epstein files just to look and see what was in there about specifically the tech billionaires. If you were to try to do all the people in tech that were in there, it would take you weeks or months. Truly, it's astonishing. But even with just billionaires, we've still got thousands of files referencing maybe about 10 or so that we found, and we sorted them, we broke it down by how many files each person was referenced in. Leah Feiger: You found 2,500 files alone associated with Bill Gates. Brian Barrett: Yes. Leah Feiger: What? Brian Barrett: Yes. A couple of caveats just real quick about all of these things, when we talk about all these people, those files represent some duplicates. They represent if Jeffrey Epstein was talking about somebody to someone else that'll show up. So it's not an exact figure. On the other hand, it's also only when their full names are mentioned. We know that Epstein referred to Bill Gates as BG in a lot of emails. So I think a couple of things stand out to me here, Leah. Leah Feiger: Yeah, hit me. Brian Barrett: One. Yes, there's a lot of Bill Gates. Gates has been on the record as saying he regrets his associate with Epstein. It's been widely reported for years, even before the first Epstein files release, that Gates was in there. Still more interesting stuff in there about that, but it more reaffirms what we know. What I was interested in more were some things that seemed relatively new. The tech billionaire who's in there the third most by our measurement was Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel, who I think there had been some reports that they had met maybe once or twice, but no, Peter Thiel is in over 2,000 Epstein files. Leah Feiger: He received political advice from Epstein. Epstein said that he wished he'd helped Peter Thiel with the Gawker suit. Brian Barrett: Yeah. I think as much as anyone else in there, Thiel seemed interested in taking a meeting, having lunch. At one point they go to Signal, which is where encrypted chats happen. At one point, Peter Thiel's assistant sent over Thiel's dietary restrictions list, which is quite expansive. Leah Feiger: It's an incredible, incredible list. We have another article on WIRED.com. Everyone go check that one out. I think the thing that gets me in so many ways, when I was looking through your story and all of the other excellent reporting on this drop, these are still people that have such an impact on our day-to-day life and day-to-day political life in the US and day-to-day tech life. Peter Thiel, cofounder of Palantir and eyes straight into Vice President Vance's office for all that we've been told. This is someone who decided that it was clearly and not just OK, but beneficial to be having these associations. And again, we don't know exactly what he knew or what all of these people knew at the time, but reading in between the lines, it's a real ... I guess what I'm saying is this isn't an issue of just 2016, this is an issue of right now. Brian Barrett: Well, and Leah, I'll actually disagree with you there. We do know what they knew to a certain extent in the sense that Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to sex crimes involving a minor in 2008. Leah Feiger: You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. Brian Barrett: And the vast majorities of these conversations take place after that. Leah Feiger: Wild. Brian Barrett: I'll say too, a lot of the times, to your point, the defense comes up a lot. ElonMusk did this right? Where he's like, oh, it's taken out of context or, oh, I nevervisited the island. Leah Feiger: We got to talk about Elon Musk. His— Brian Barrett: We have to. In terms of out of context and never visiting the island, well, on November 25, 2012, Elon Musk wrote to Jeffrey Epstein: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Leah Feiger: He's begging to attend. There's no other way to interpret this. Brian Barrett: He really wants to go. Leah Feiger: There's no other way to interpret this. And also specifically that language. “The wildest party.” Not even just like, “Oh, when is ... The wildest party?” There's so many different parts of this. That gag reflex. Absolutely. Brian Barrett: So the fact that the calendars didn't line up, sure, that gives you some plausible deniability, but if they had, you would've been right there. So it is really disappointing. I do want to say, not to defend anybody, but a lot of the names in there are circumstantial in a way, and I think the bigger point is that Jeffrey Epstein really wanted to be close to these people. He happened to be at a dinner party with Jeff Bezos, no indication that they ever talked, no indication, whatever. But still, Jeff Bezos winds up in the Epstein files hundreds of times just because Epstein was reading articles about him or at the same place that he was, so it is— Leah Feiger: Talking about him. Yeah. Absolutely. Brian Barrett: Yeah. It's just this web. It fills out this web. Leah Feiger: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, these are the tech titans. Brian Barrett: Yeah. Up until as recently as 2019, I think some of these people were actively in touch. Leah Feiger: Wow. So speaking of Elon, he was also in the news this week for an entirely different thing, aka rolling xAI into SpaceX, officially creating the world's most valuable private company. We’ve got to talk about that. Brian Barrett: Yeah. And I know that you love ... This combines your two favorite things. Leah Feiger: Oh, yes. Absolutely. Brian Barrett: AI and Elon Musk. Leah Feiger: Uh-huh. Brian Barrett: Leah, could I also interest you in a potential third favorite thing? Leah Feiger: Oh, hit me, Brian. Brian Barrett: Can I interest you in data centers in space? Leah Feiger: So that's what he's promising, right? Brian Barrett: Yeah. Leah Feiger: I'm actually very interested in data centers. Brian Barrett: Oh, good. Leah Feiger: Molly Taft, our wonderful climate reporter on the science desk, has entirely turned me around on how important it is to engage with them. I hate them, but I am very interested in them. So he wants to build a data center in space. What does that mean? What is a terrestrial solution? Please explain all of these things. Brian Barrett: Well, basically, yeah. So Elon Musk's pitch for combining SpaceX and xAI. And just to back up a second, SpaceX is Elon Musk's most mainstream, noncontroversial company, probably. Leah Feiger: It's his rocket company. Brian Barrett: Yeah. It's his rocket company. They basically have privatized NASA, partly because NASA gave up. Anyway ... Leah Feiger: No. Brian Barrett: The US space future really depends on SpaceX in so many ways. Leah Feiger: If Jeff Bezos is listening to this podcast, he's having just a true— Brian Barrett: Sorry, Blue Origin. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Leah Feiger: Internal. Brian Barrett: Terrible day. Blue Origin also there. So on the one hand, you've got this sort of future of US space travel, and on the other side you've got xAI, which is Elon Musk's AI company that keeps undressing women nonconsensually. Leah Feiger: And is also X, formerly known as Twitter. Brian Barrett: Yes. And now they're all going to be the same thing. Leah Feiger: Former Twitter employees, did they make a lot of money from this? What's happening? How are all of these companies now the same thing? None of this has relations to each other other than Elon Musk. Brian Barrett: So he would argue differently. And so the case that he would make is that in order for AI to get where it needs to be, wherever that is—faster undressing of more women—for it to get there, there's literally not enough energy on Earth to make that happen. So what you need to do is you need to go out in space and harness the energy of the sun to power AI. And who is really good at going out into space and harnessing things? SpaceX. Leah Feiger: Oh God. Brian Barrett: So we need to put SpaceX in service of xAI to make sure that we can harness the power of the sun, or as Elon Musk said, scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars. Leah Feiger: I'm getting this from your tone of voice, and we haven't had this legally approved or anything, but can we just call bullshit? It was also suggested that Tesla could merge with xAI and SpaceX. Tesla recently invested $2 billion in xAI. At that point this is basically all of Elon Musk's companies. You can talk about as sentient sun as much as you want, whatever that may entail. But this is just him combining all of his stuff together in one big pile and saying, I deserve as much money as possible from this. No? Brian Barrett: Yeah. There are parts that you can call if not bullshit you can raise your eyebrow really, really high on, and parts you can say, well, maybe this is Elon Musk's unified theory of the future. I was surprised by this. I have been deeply skeptical of data centers in space. As much as I like to say it, I think it actually is where we're going. I think that is a thing that is going to happen at some point, and SpaceX is in a really good position to do it. I do think, to your point though about all that intermingling: Look, SpaceX is a company that's really, really important to the US government because of that NASA thing. And so suddenly tying its fortunes into this pretty controversial AI company, suddenly making its mission to be more about powering that AI than getting to Mars or wherever, that's going to invite some regulatory concern. I think the US is going to take a closer look at this than they have taken a look at other Elon Musk projects because look, SpaceX has twentysomething billion in government contracts. Leah Feiger: I don't know. I like to think that the US government would be taking a closer look at this. I think as we know in so much WIRED reporting and other reportings out there, the regulatory bodies that are able to look at things like this have been slashed and dismantled, and a lot of yes, men put in charge. So I'm very curious about where these regulatory conversations and reviews go. Brian Barrett: And I'm curious too. SpaceX wants to IPO this year. Tesla stock is doing pretty well. But I think increasingly Elon Musk is betting it all on sci-fi, right? It's true. Leah Feiger: Yeah. You're absolutely right. Brian Barrett: Tesla is no longer a car company. He has made it very clear. Tesla is not a car company. Tesla is a company that sells humanoid robots, and we're going to put them in every home. Tesla is a company that is going to have driverless robotaxis in every city. So he's basically saying, look, all my companies right now are in service of what I think is going to happen, could happen, may happen in he would probably say two years. But when he says two years, it usually means five to 10 to never. Leah Feiger: I'm really waiting for the next commercial. Do you know where your child is? It's 10 pm. Oh, no, don't worry, they're with their humanoid robot and their driverless taxi. Brian Barrett: Yeah. They're playing Frisbee with optimists. Leah Feiger: So before we go to break, Brian, just to change this up a little bit, so many things happening in the US this week. We'd be really remiss to not at least briefly talk about a big WIRED scoop that just came out that the politics desk at WIRED got this week all about an online forum where ICE agents log on and complain about their jobs. Brian Barrett: Leah, this was a fascinating read from Tori Elliott, who spent some time lurking in these forums. And I think what stands out, maybe not surprisingly, but it is a reminder of they have the same workaday complaints that any group of people would have. Leah Feiger: Oh, absolutely. But it's a little more serious when an ICE agent is telling you that they're super tired and overworked and haven't taken a day off in a while because they're the ones with the gun. Brian Barrett: Yeah. Leah Feiger: Reading this was wild because I'm with you because on one hand you're going, OK, yes, we're all humans. We're all dealing with these things, and on the other, you're in charge of this right now, you're in charge of this massive surge. To back up a little bit, this forum of over 5,000 alleged current and former ICE and CBP officers has them venting about long work hours, limited overtime pay, incompetent leadership, poorly trained new recruits. A lot of these claims—I have to add as a fun little side note—a lot of these came in after ICE actually lost their union representation a few years ago because ICE accused the union of being too far left. No comment further required. To add, just as a little backdrop here, the forum doesn't require proof of employment, but it's a really interesting look inside of ICE's workforce, and it has a lot of information and very specific details that really only these people would know. Some of these quotes were wild. What stood out to you? Brian Barrett: What jumped out to me, the ones that really had that “woe is me” tenor, but also the ones that called the agency to task in a way that you don't see externally, at least. There's one quote, "led by some of the worst leadership I've ever witnessed from the local level all the way up to the national stage, this agency has managed to turn a righteous mission into a complete clown show." Now, you might agree with half of that. You might agree with the whole thing. I don't know whether it was ever necessarily righteous, but it is interesting to see how they are working through this. And to be clear, some of these people, when they make those complaints, they do get jumped on. I think there is a pretty active— Leah Feiger: Oh yeah. Lots of pushback. Brian Barrett: Yeah. Lots of pushback. Lots of people who are still very committed to the mission, still think it's pretty righteous. Leah Feiger: Honestly, the people talking about the mission and however these agents may feel about what's happening in Minnesota, what happened in Chicago, what happened in LA, and what appears to be getting ready to happen in different parts of the United States, what was really interesting to me was not even just their focus on their mission, but how they were about to go about it. There was one user who was saying they had just finished the Virtual Deportation Officer Transition Program, which they also said had been shortened, and they'd been transitioned to practicals like firearms training. And they wrote in the chat that the new agent kit had arrived on Friday, this big box full of body armor, gear, Glock, bunch of other stuff. But then they said that the process was wildly chaotic. They still didn't have access to GovTa, which is a system that the government uses to track workers' time and leave. They didn't have access to the electronic official personnel folder, which allows employees to access their own records. So basically, they're not actually getting fully onboarded according to posters on this forum, but they're still being handed a gun. This is wildly chaotic. Brian Barrett: Extremely. And Leah, did you see anything in their editorial, in her reporting, about the protests you mentioned in Minnesota or the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. Did they engage with that at all? Leah Feiger: Yeah. So they did, and a lot of the posts ... The posts have been happening for over a decade now at this point, but posts definitely have been heating up this month. A couple of days before Pretti was killed, a user started a thread ready to resign, had enough stress, and people were commenting on it and going back and forth. And I think that was when the quote that you mentioned came up, “led by some of the worst” people. And they continued on after that. We didn't find things of people going like, oh, this is horrible. This person was killed. It doesn't mean that it wasn't there. These are so many posts. But a lot of people posting are very concerned about ICE's image. They're very concerned by how this is coming across. They're very concerned about the chaos from the big things, noting these deaths, but also even randomly almost seemingly little stuff. This one quote I just can't get enough of, which is “I'm all for removing illegals, but snatching dudes off lawn mowers in Cali and leaving the truck and equipment just sitting there, definitely not working smarter.” It's just such a wild one, because it's someone going like, what is this chaos machine that I'm now part of? Whether or not we agree with any part of the sentiment. Brian Barrett: What I thought really was interesting too, in telling in the forum ... And maybe this doesn't play out across all of them, but it does say how long someone has been in the forum, which is a little bit of a shorthand for how long they have been in ICE and working with this organization. And you can see how if you have been doing this for a decade and you do think that there is a right way to do this, I think clearly we're in a world where that's not the way it's working anymore. So not to have sympathy for ICE, but it's at least interesting to see who's pushing back, how long they've been there when it's veterans versus people who just got there, which again, it gets back to also it's a workplace in some ways. It's a work environment. It's just one that is also a paramilitary force that is occupying US cities. Leah Feiger: Right. And honestly, a bird's-eye view is—as interesting as this article is and as juicy and telling as some of these quotes are, to my knowledge at least—there isn't any other reporting out there like this. This snapshot in time of what ice agents are talking about and going through. They're not really talking to that many other people about it. You have a couple of articles here or there. New York Times spoke to three ICE agents about what's going on. No. This is thousands. These are thousands of people talking about their day-to-day concerns with their jobs, with their bosses, with their coworkers, and with their mission. It's a snapshot in time that we're going to just have to keep looking at. Brian Barrett: And we will. Coming up after the break, we're going all the way to Laos in Southeast Asia to hear how a whistleblower was able to document and escape a crypto scam compound. Stay with us. Andy Greenberg: I was having a normal Saturday on the roof with my kids. They were playing in a kiddie pool. Brian Barrett: Last summer my colleague Andy Greenberg was enjoying an idyllic late afternoon in New York— Andy Greenberg:There had just been a rainstorm and there was a rainbow. It was a very beautiful evening. And I in typical terrible 21st century parenting style was ignoring my kids and looking at my phone and scrolling through messages. Brian Barrett: —in the middle of mindlessly scrolling between apps. Andy Greenberg: I've got this email. I found this email from someone with a pseudonym who is messaging me from the encrypted email service Proton Mail. Brian Barrett: The email is from an unnamed source who claimed to be a computer engineer in Laos. Andy Greenberg: A computer engineer trapped in a compound in the region of Laos who wanted to be a source, who wanted to be a whistleblower inside this crypto scam compound. Brian Barrett: As a cybersecurity reporter, crypto scams are Andy's bread and butter. That's what he's constantly tracking down. Trends in hacking and cybercrime. But crypto scam compounds are a beast of their own. These are places where scam operations happen at an industrial scale and crypto scams have become the most profitable form of cybercrime in the world, pulling in 10s of billions of dollars each year. Andy didn't know if this anonymous source was legit, but he followed up and told the source to message him through Signal. Later that evening, Andy received a flurry of messages. Andy Greenberg: They shared really detailed documents right off the bat, like an actual written report, a summary of everything they had experienced and everything about the way that this scam compound worked, including this very, very detailed flow chart that included some elements that I had never heard of before. Brian Barrett: These documents describe step-by-step the methods that this crypto compound uses to lure victims into their scams. From creating fake Facebook and Instagram profiles to using hired models and AI deepfake tools, all of it to create the illusion of a romantic prospect, something they call pig butchering. Andy Greenberg: The idea of pig butchering is that these are crypto romance investment scams. Brian Barrett: The operation starts with the scammer using social media profiles to convincingly take the identity of say, a wealthy woman. Andy Greenberg: A wealthy woman getting in touch usually with a lonely, very often older man and enticing them with some sort of intimate relationship. Brian Barrett: Trust is built through these video calls and constant back and forth messages. Andy Greenberg: The pig butchering part of this is that the pig is fattened up with this emotional connection, like somebody builds a real relationship with the victim until there's a lot of trust and intimacy. Brian Barrett: Eventually the scammer gives some financial advice to their mark. Andy Greenberg: And this wealthy woman says, “By the way, I can help you become wealthy too. It seems like you're having some financial problems and I can just refer you to the same crypto trading platform that I use, and you can easily double your money. It's a very safe bet. I'll walk you through it. In fact, I would be disappointed in you if you didn't try it.” And that process is incredibly effective it turns out. And only after weeks or months of that fattening up romantic process is the pig butchered. Brian Barrett: If you're wondering how someone could fall for that, you should know that the methods these scammers use take everything into account. Through documents shared by his news source. Andy learned that they use deepfakes to interact with their victims through video calls and AI chatbots to finesse their messages. They also make sure to match the scammers ethnicity with that at their target to avoid any language or cultural barriers. But the thing is, these operations don't just make victims out of their targets. Scam compounds lure workers, meaning the scammers behind the fake Facebook and Instagram accounts from Asian and African countries with legitimate job offers. Once they arrive at the sites, their passports are taken and they're essentially trapped and forced to become scammers. Andy Greenberg: A human trafficking operation that essentially enslaves people, tricks them into coming to this compound, turns them into forced laborers, traps them there and forces them to scam people for sometimes 15, 16 hour shifts. On one side, it's taking people's entire life savings very often, hundreds of thousands or even over a million dollars from victims in a single scam. But then on the other side, there are hundreds of thousands of enslaved people whose lives have been completely ruined as they're trapped in these compounds. Brian Barrett: The engineer who reached out to Andy is one of these workers trapped in Laos in a region bordering Myanmar and Thailand, where illicit operations are the norm. Andy Greenberg: The Golden Triangle, I've always heard about it as this kind of vague region at the intersection of the borders of Laos and Myanmar and Thailand that has been carved out as this special economic zone that is almost in an official sense, not controlled by Laos, but instead controlled by Chinese business interests. It is essentially run by Chinese, both business people and very Chinese organized criminal syndicates. This very small area, just like half the size of Washington, DC, or something, it is now a hub for all sorts of transnational crime and crypto scam compounds may in fact be the biggest and most lucrative form of those. Brian Barrett: And now it seemed the engineer who contacted Andy was willing to be a whistleblower for one of these compounds. Andy Greenberg: This was somebody who had been trapped like this and wanted to expose everything he could about the operation. Brian Barrett: Andy's trying to figure out if this guy is legit when he calls him out of the blue. Archival audio: Red Bull: Hello. Andy Greenberg: Hello. Red Bull: I'm fine. How are you? Andy Greenberg: Good. Good. Thank you for being willing to talk. Andy Greenberg: I picked up the phone and I'm talking to this young, very polite man with an Indian accent. Archival audio: Andy Greenberg: What is your name or what can I call you? Red Bull: You can call me from any name brother. No matter. Andy Greenberg: Oh, but you tell me just so I know how to talk to you and what name to call you. You can make one up if you like of course. Red Bull: You can call me Red Bull. OK. Andy Greenberg: Oh, Red Bull. Red Bull? Red Bull: Yeah. Yes. Andy Greenberg: OK. OK. Andy Greenberg: And I later found out that he was looking at an empty can of a Red Bull energy drink on the table in front of him when he said that. He was so motivated as a source, so driven that I was almost ... I was a little put off. I was wary of this person, and I quickly actually hung up and then called him back on a video call because I wanted to see who I was talking to. And he picked up with no hesitation and showed me his face on the video call. Showed me around the hotel room. He had actually managed to book a hotel room. And I asked him to show me out the window to walk outside the hotel. It was nighttime my time, but it was daytime there and he showed me the front of the hotel, which I could see that it was a Chinese language sign that there were palm trees and that it looked like a poor tropical area where everything was in Chinese, and that certainly sounded like the Golden Triangle to me. So I started to get what felt like confirmation very quickly that he was who he said and that he really was in a scam compound and that he was in the Golden Triangle. Brian Barrett: I think it's interesting too. I think when you hear about people and about people enslaved in these compounds, you don't really necessarily think that they have that amount of mobility, the ability to go rent out a hotel room, walk around on the street, take video, but it's a little bit of a different setup in terms of what's keeping them there. Is that fair to say? Andy Greenberg: I was also surprised. I had read reports of these scam slavery compounds where people are held in shackles and beaten every day and electrocuted in some cases, and they're held almost in the jungle in remote places. The Golden Triangle compounds are not like that. In part because the Golden Triangle itself is almost like a mega compound. The victims of these human trafficking operations, even if they walk around outside the building where they work, or even the dormitory where they live, their passport has been taken away. The police have very often been paid off by the compound mafia. They can't really leave regardless. So they have a surprising freedom of movement because the whole place is essentially like a closed circuit. Brian Barrett: A closed circuit where as the source Red Bull described to Andy, they had a strict work schedule and punitive measures. Andy Greenberg: They were actually paid, in theory, a salary of like $500 a month or so in Chinese Yuan. But then that money was taken from them almost entirely through fines for every tiny violation that their bosses could think of. They had access to a cafeteria where they were fed, but that food was withheld if they so much as showed up late to work or late to lights out in the dormitory. So there was this illusion of them being there voluntarily being paid a salary. They were even in theory, paid a commission on any scams they pulled off. But Red Bull was entirely broke. He had been scammed into absolute poverty, had no money. So it was a Orwellian thing where the bosses would give people these inspirational speeches as if they were part of some corporate sales force, like part of a car dealership or something. And in fact, they were absolutely forced laborers with no choice about what they were doing and who faced really brutal consequences if they ever broke the rules or tried to escape. Brian Barrett: It had been less than 24 hours since Red Bull had first made contact, but the details were quickly mounting up. He told Andy that they should involve law enforcement and that he was willing to work with an FBI handler. He specifically wanted to inform them about an upcoming in-person cash transaction that was happening on US soil and was related to one of the compound scams. Andy Greenberg: They were going to do an in-person pickup of cash with a courier. So Red Bull wanted me to arrange a sting operation to catch this courier and question this guy and he thought that that would be a big win against the scam operation. Brian Barrett: That's when Andy decided to reach out to Erin West, a former California prosecutor who now runs an anti-scam organization. Andy Greenberg: Erin thought there was no time to do a sting. She also said that any courier is super far down the hierarchy of a scam operation and it would not be a good idea. Also, she pointed out that that would call attention to the fact that there was a leak in the compound and could put Red Bull's life at risk. But then I asked her, what do you think about putting him in touch with an FBI agent, somebody to be his handler? Can you recommend somebody? And to my surprise, she suggested that I not do that either. She thought that the story I could produce with Red Bull as a source would be more important than anything he could give law enforcement. That in the best case scenario in years, what he provided might lead to the arrest of somebody low down in the org chart of a scam compound or possibly just charges in absentia for somebody who could not possibly be arrested or extradited from Laos from the Golden Triangle. As she put it, the cavalry is not coming. Nobody from Interpol or the FBI is going to march into this scam compound in the Golden Triangle and start arresting people. Brian Barrett: When Red Bull suggested that you organize a sting, which Andy, you are a incredibly gifted reporter, I believe that's not in your skill set necessarily. Andy Greenberg: Absolutely not. Brian Barrett: Not. But it was, I think, an indicator of something that we ended up talking about a lot throughout this reporting process, which is that Red Bull was not just willing, but at times very eager to take big chances. Andy Greenberg: Yeah. Red Bull was just remarkably risk-tolerant. Had so many dangerous ideas about what he wanted to do. He wanted to wear a hidden camera or hidden microphone, a button camera or some sort of watch with a recording device in it. He wanted to install spyware on his boss's computer. He wanted to set up a screen recording software on his work PC so that I could see what he was doing all day long. And I consulted with you about all these things, and then many other experts, and everybody told me one by one, these are not good ideas. This will get Red Bull killed. And I took that very seriously. And we didn't do any of that. I talked him out of all of those ideas. And what we ultimately settled on was a much simpler system that I still think actually turned out to be pretty effective, which was just that he installed a disguised version of Signal on his work PC. Brian Barrett: A disguised version of Signal. Basically, Red Bull installed the app on his work computer with a different icon, making it look like it was a shortcut to his hard drive. Andy Greenberg: And then we would talk with disappearing messages set to a very low time period so there was not much of a log if we were ever caught. Brian Barrett: Andy and Red Bull also took up aliases. Andy Greenberg: He would pretend that he was talking to his uncle. He would call me uncle from time to time just in case somebody spotted what he was doing. Brian Barrett: Some of those aliases were a little more embarrassing than others. Andy Greenberg: Eventually, we upgraded our cover story to me pretending to be his secret girlfriend, and we used a lot of heart emojis, but that was a little too cringey and we just couldn't keep it up. Brian Barrett: But the golden rule that stuck was how Andy and Red Bull would say hi to each other. Andy Greenberg: We created a protocol where when we started the conversation, the first person would say, Red, that the second person would say, Bull to make sure that his computer had not been seized. Brian Barrett: As their communication got into a rhythm, Red Bull filled in a very detailed map of the inner workings of the scam compound operation. Andy Greenberg: He sent me photos of a whiteboard that showed a leaderboard of who had scammed the most that month. He sent me a spreadsheet that turned out to be a floor plan of the whole dormitory and all the different workers there. He sent me a picture of this big Chinese ceremonial drum that was played for scams of a hundred thousand dollars or more. And then once in a while, he would then tell me to record my screen and turn on video on those calls, and then keep pretending to talk to his uncle as he walked around and videotaped and I recorded outside the compound, into the lobby of the office, sometimes into the cafeteria and once into the actual work floor, the office itself, where I could see the whole layout of the office and even colored flags on different teams desks to connote whether they had met their scam quota of revenue that month. Brian Barrett: As the weeks passed by, the wall started to close in on Red Bull. His team leader started asking questions about why he wasn't generating enough new so-called clients, and then he threatened him with a beating. At this point, Andy consulted with me and the other editors at WIRED. We decided that the safest thing was to stop the reporting process with Red Bull, at least until we knew he was safe. Andy Greenberg: I told Red Bull, let's stop. We got to stop. You gave me enough. Thank you. Let's just wait and we'll speak again when you are free and you're home, then we will talk again. But when I said this to him like that, we're done with our reporting process, he immediately in that conversation said, well, then I need to get out of here now. I'm going to find a way to escape. Brian Barrett: For the full story of what happened to Red Bull and the crypto scam compound he was escaping from you can head to WIRED.com. We promise it's worth your time. Thank you for listening. Leah Feiger: This episode was produced by Adriana Tapia and Tyler Hill. It was edited by Kate Osborn, Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Matt Giles and Daniel Roman fact-checked this episode. Mark Leyda was our SF studio engineer. Pran Bandi was our NY Studio engineer. Kate Osborn is our executive producer, and Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director. 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Contents Fox News The Fox News Channel (FNC), often referred to as Fox News, is an American multinational conservative news and political commentary television channel and website based in New York City. Owned by the Fox News Media subsidiary of Fox Corporation, it is the most-watched cable news network in the United States, and as of 2023 it generates approximately 70% of its parent company's pre-tax profit. The channel broadcasts primarily from studios at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan. Fox News provides service to 86 countries and territories, with international broadcasts featuring Fox Extra segments during advertising breaks. The channel was created by Australian-born American media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1996 to appeal to a conservative audience, hiring former Republican media consultant and CNBC executive Roger Ailes as its founding CEO. It launched on October 7, 1996 to 17 million cable subscribers. Fox News grew during the late 1990s and 2000s to become the dominant United States cable news subscription network. By September 2018, 87 million U.S. households (91% of television subscribers) could receive Fox News. In 2019, it was the top-rated cable network, averaging 2.5 million viewers in prime time. Murdoch, the executive chairman since 2016, said in 2023 that he would step down and hand responsibilities to his son, Lachlan. Suzanne Scott has been the CEO since 2018. It has been criticized for biased and false reporting in favor of the Republican Party, its politicians, and conservative causes, while portraying the Democratic Party in a negative light. Some researchers have argued that the channel is damaging to the integrity of news overall, and acts as the de facto broadcasting arm of the Republican Party. Since its formation, the channel has politically shifted further rightwards over time, and by 2016 became solidly pro-Trump. The channel has knowingly endorsed false conspiracy theories to promote Republican and conservative causes. These include, but are not limited to, false claims regarding fraud with Dominion voting machines during their reporting on the 2020 presidential election, climate change denial,[a] and COVID-19 misinformation. It has also been involved in multiple controversies, including accusations of permitting sexual harassment and racial discrimination by on-air hosts, executives, and employees, ultimately paying out millions of dollars in legal settlements. History In May 1985, Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch announced that he and American industrialist and philanthropist Marvin Davis intended to develop "a network of independent stations as a fourth marketing force" to directly compete with CBS, NBC, and ABC through the purchase of six television stations owned by Metromedia. In July 1985, 20th Century Fox announced Murdoch had completed his purchase of 50% of Fox Filmed Entertainment, the parent company of 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. Subsequently, and prior to founding FNC, Murdoch had gained experience in the 24-hour news business when News Corporation's BSkyB subsidiary began Europe's first 24-hour news channel (Sky News) in the United Kingdom in 1989. With the success of his efforts establishing Fox as a TV network in the United States, experience gained from Sky News and the turnaround of 20th Century Fox, Murdoch announced on January 30, 1996, that News Corp. would launch a 24-hour news channel on cable and satellite systems in the United States as part of a News Corp. "worldwide platform" for Fox programming: "The appetite for news – particularly news that explains to people how it affects them – is expanding enormously". In February 1996, after former U.S. Republican Party political strategist and NBC executive Roger Ailes left cable television channel America's Talking (now MSNBC), Murdoch asked him to start Fox News Channel. Ailes demanded five months of 14-hour workdays and several weeks of rehearsal shows before its launch on October 7, 1996. At its debut, 17 million households were able to watch FNC; however, it was absent from the largest U.S. media markets of New York City and Los Angeles. Rolling news coverage during the day consisted of 20-minute single-topic shows such as Fox on Crime or Fox on Politics, surrounded by news headlines. Interviews featured facts at the bottom of the screen about the topic or the guest. The flagship newscast at the time was The Schneider Report, with Mike Schneider's fast-paced delivery of the news. During the evening, Fox featured opinion shows: The O'Reilly Report (later The O'Reilly Factor), The Crier Report (hosted by Catherine Crier) and Hannity & Colmes. From the beginning, FNC has placed heavy emphasis on visual presentation. Graphics were designed to be colorful and gain attention; this helped the viewer to grasp the main points of what was being said, even if they could not hear the host (with on-screen text summarizing the position of the interviewer or speaker, and "bullet points" when a host was delivering commentary). Fox News also created the "Fox News Alert", which interrupted its regular programming when a breaking news story occurred. To accelerate its adoption by cable providers, Fox News paid systems up to $11 per subscriber to distribute the channel. This contrasted with the normal practice, in which cable operators paid stations carriage fees for programming. When Time Warner bought Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting System, a federal antitrust consent decree required Time Warner to carry a second all-news channel in addition to its own CNN on its cable systems. Time Warner selected MSNBC as the secondary news channel, not Fox News. Fox News claimed this violated an agreement (to carry Fox News). Citing its agreement to keep its U.S. headquarters and a large studio in New York City, News Corporation enlisted the help of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration to pressure Time Warner Cable (one of the city's two cable providers) to transmit Fox News on a city-owned channel. City officials threatened to take action affecting Time Warner's cable franchises in the city. In 2001, during the September 11 attacks, Fox News was the first news organization to run a news ticker on the bottom of the screen to keep up with the flow of information that day. The ticker has remained, and has proven popular with viewers. In January 2002, Fox News surpassed CNN in ratings for the first time. Accelerating in the 2000s, the role of conservative media and Fox News led to it being trusted by the Republican Party's base over that of traditional conservative elites, and partly led to Donald Trump's victory in the Republican primaries against the wishes of a very weak party establishment and traditional power brokers.: 27–28 Fox News subsequently became solidly pro-Trump, and cultivated deep ties between itself and the government. For his first term, nearly 20 current and former Fox News hosts received administrative and cabinet-level positions in his administration, and his second term also featured 23 current and former Fox News hosts appointed and nominated. In 2023, The Economist reported that Murdoch had "ditched a plan" to remerge News Corporation with Fox because it "faced resistance from News Corp investors unhappy at the prospect of being lumped together with Fox News, which they consider a toxic brand." Later that year, Murdoch said he would step down and that his son Lachlan would take over both Fox Corporation and News Corp, although the succession was disputed legally. In September 2025, Lachlan Murdoch secured control of Fox News, the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal in a $3.3 billion dollar deal as part of a renegotiated trust. The new trust and Lachlan's control was described as ensuring the channel's conservative slant until its expiration in 2050. Political alignment Fox News has been identified as practicing biased and false reporting in favor of the Republican Party, its politicians, and conservative causes, while portraying the Democratic Party in a negative light. Fox News has been characterized by critics, commentators, and researchers as an advocacy news organization[b] and as damaging to the integrity of news overall. It has been criticized for sharing propaganda.[c] The network is pro-Trump. During and after the 2020 presidential election, its primetime hosts promoted Trump and the Republican Party, and host Jeanine Pirro was in communication with the chair of the Republican National Committee. By 2017, a growing number of studies and academic literature found Fox's prime-time programming engaging in rhetorical and nonfactual themes similar to propaganda and not journalism or persuasion. Academic studies have argued that it has played a major role in boosting Republican turnout in American elections and that its role in American politics has been underestimated by political and communications scholars. Fox has been described as operating in an information silo where its audience views other media sources as "too liberal", and thus rely on Fox and no other forms of news media. Researchers and commentators have compared conservative Fox News as similar in purpose to liberal MSNBC, but that "the proportion of Fox News statements that are mostly false or worse is almost 50 percent higher than for MSNBC, and more than twice that of CNN". Its news coverage has gradually shifted further rightwards over time. Fox's most popular programs such as Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight do not make any claims to be accurate or fact-checked, and have little to no distinction between news and commentary. Media analyst Brian Stelter, who has written extensively about the network, observed in 2021 that in more recent years it had adjusted its programming to present "less news on the air and more opinions-about-the-news" throughout the day, on concerns it was losing viewers to more conservative competitors that were presenting such content. Outlets FNC maintains an archive of most of its programs. This archive also includes Movietone News series of newsreels from its now Disney-owned namesake movie studio, 20th Century Studios. Licensing for the Fox News archive is handled by ITN Source, the archiving division of ITN. FNC presents a variety of programming, with up to 15 hours of live broadcasting per day in addition to programming and content for the Fox Broadcasting Company. Most programs are broadcast from Fox News headquarters in New York City (at 1211 Avenue of the Americas), in its streetside studio on Sixth Avenue in the west wing of Rockefeller Center, sharing its headquarters with sister channel Fox Business Network. Fox News Channel has eight studios at its New York City headquarters that are used for its and Fox Business' programming: Studio B (used for Fox Business programming), Studio D (which has an area for studio audiences; no longer in current use), Studio E (used for Gutfeld! and The Journal Editorial Report), Studio F (used for The Story with Martha MacCallum, The Five, Fox Democracy 2020, Fox & Friends, Outnumbered, The Faulkner Focus, and Fox News Primetime), Studio G (which houses Fox Business shows, The Fox Report, Your World with Neil Cavuto, and Cavuto Live), Studio H (Fox News Deck used for breaking news coverage, no longer in current use), Studio J (used for America's Newsroom, Hannity, Fox News Live, Fox & Friends First, and Sunday Morning Futures) Starting in 2018, Thursday Night Football had its pregame show, Fox NFL Thursday, originating from Studio F. Another Fox Sports program, First Things First, also broadcasts from Studio E. Other such programs (such as Special Report with Bret Baier, The Ingraham Angle, Fox News @ Night, Media Buzz, and editions of Fox News Live not broadcast from the New York City studios) are broadcast from Fox News's Washington, D.C. studios, located on Capitol Hill across from Washington Union Station in a secured building shared by a number of other television networks, which includes NBC News and C-SPAN. The Next Revolution is broadcast from Fox News' Los Angeles bureau studio, which is also used for news updates coming from Los Angeles. Life, Liberty & Levin is done from Levin's personal studio in Virginia. Audio simulcasts of the channel are aired on SiriusXM Satellite Radio. In an October 11, 2009, in a New York Times article, Fox said its hard-news programming runs from "9 AM to 4 PM and 6 to 8 PM on weekdays". However, it makes no such claims for its other broadcasts, which primarily consist of editorial journalism and commentary. Fox News Channel began broadcasting in the 720p resolution format on May 1, 2008. This format is available on all major cable and satellite providers. Fox News Media produces Fox News Sunday, which airs on Fox Broadcasting and re-airs on the Fox News Channel. Fox News also produces occasional special event coverage that is broadcast on Fox Business. With the growth of the FNC, the company introduced a radio division, Fox News Radio, in 2003. Syndicated throughout the United States, the division provides short newscasts and talk radio programs featuring personalities from the television and radio divisions. In 2006, the company also introduced Fox News Talk, a satellite radio station featuring programs syndicated by (and featuring) Fox News personalities. Introduced in December 1995, the Fox News website features news articles and videos about national and international news. Content on the website is divided into politics, media, U.S., and business. Fox News' articles are based on the network's broadcasts, reports from Fox affiliates and articles produced by other news agencies, such as the Associated Press. Articles are usually accompanied by a video related to the article. Fox News Latino is the version aimed at a Hispanic audience, although presented almost entirely in English, with a Spanish section. According to NewsGuard, "Much of FoxNews.com's content, particularly articles produced by beat reporters and broadcasts produced by network correspondents, is accurate and well-sourced ... However, FoxNews.com has regularly advanced false and misleading claims on topics including the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Russo-Ukrainian War, COVID-19, and U.S. elections". In September 2008, FNC joined other channels in introducing a live streaming segment to its website: The Strategy Room, designed to appeal to older viewers. It airs weekdays from 9 AM to 5 PM and takes the form of an informal discussion, with running commentary on the news. Regular discussion programs include Business Hour, News With a View and God Talk. In March 2009, The Fox Nation was launched as a website intended to encourage readers to post articles commenting on the news. Fox News Mobile is the portion of the FNC website dedicated to streaming news clips formatted for video-enabled mobile phones. In 2018, Fox News announced that it would launch a subscription video on demand service known as Fox Nation. It serves as a companion service to FNC, carrying original and acquired talk, documentary, and reality programming designed to appeal to Fox News viewers. Some of its original programs feature Fox News personalities and contributors. Ratings and reception In 2003, Fox News saw a large ratings jump during the early stages of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At the height of the conflict, according to some reports, Fox News had as much as a 300% increase in viewership (averaging 3.3 million viewers daily). In 2004, Fox News' ratings for its broadcast of the Republican National Convention exceeded those of the three major broadcast networks. During President George W. Bush's address, Fox News attracted 7.3 million viewers nationally; NBC, ABC, and CBS had a viewership of 5.9 million, 5.1 million, and 5.0 million respectively. Between late 2005 and early 2006, Fox News saw a brief decline in ratings. One was in the second quarter of 2006, when it lost viewers for every prime-time program compared with the previous quarter. The audience for Special Report with Brit Hume, for example, dropped 19%. Several weeks later, in the wake of the 2006 North Korean missile test and the 2006 Lebanon War, Fox saw a surge in viewership and remained the top-rated cable news channel. Fox produced eight of the top ten most-watched nightly cable news shows, with The O'Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes finishing first and second respectively. FNC ranked No. 8 in viewership among all cable channels in 2006, and No. 7 in 2007. The channel ranked number one during the week of Barack Obama's election (November 3–9) in 2008, and reached the top spot again in January 2010 (during the week of the special Senate election in Massachusetts). Comparing Fox to its 24-hour-news-channel competitors in May 2010, the channel drew an average daily prime-time audience of 1.8 million viewers (versus 747,000 for MSNBC and 595,000 for CNN). In September 2009, the Pew Research Center published a report on the public view of national news organizations. In the report, 72% of polled Republican Fox viewers rated the channel as "favorable", while 43% of polled Democratic viewers and 55% of all polled viewers shared that opinion. However, Fox was given the highest "unfavorable" rating of all national outlets studied (25% of all polled viewers). The report went on to say that "partisan differences in views of Fox News have increased substantially since 2007". A January 2020 Pew Research Center study found that 43% of all American adults trusted Fox News, including 65% of Republicans and people who lean Republican, while 61% of Democrats and people who lean Democratic distrusted Fox News. A Public Policy Polling poll concluded in 2013 that positive perceptions of FNC had declined from 2010. 41% of polled voters said they trust it, down from 49% in 2010, while 46% said they distrust it, up from 37% in 2010. It was also called the "most trusted" network by 34% of those polled, more than had said the same of any other network. On the night of October 22, 2012, Fox set a record for its highest-rated telecast, with 11.5 million viewers for the third U.S. presidential debate. In prime time the week before, Fox averaged almost 3.7 million viewers with a total day average of 1.66 million viewers. In prime time and total day ratings for the week of April 15 to 21, 2013, Fox News, propelled by its coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, was the highest-ranked network on U.S. cable television, for the first time since August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the United States. January 2014 marked Fox News's 145th consecutive month as the highest-rated cable news channel. During that month, Fox News beat CNN and MSNBC combined in overall viewers in both prime time hours and the total day. In the third quarter of 2014, the network was the most-watched cable channel during prime time hours. During the final week of the campaign for the United States elections, 2014, Fox News had the highest ratings of any cable channel, news or otherwise. On election night itself, Fox News' coverage had higher ratings than that of any of the other five cable or network news sources among viewers between 25 and 54 years of age. The network hosted the first prime-time GOP candidates' forum of the 2016 campaign on August 6. The debate reached a record-breaking 24 million viewers, by far the largest audience for any cable news event. A 2017 study by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University found that Fox News was the third most-shared source among supporters of Donald Trump on Twitter during the 2016 presidential election, behind The Hill and Breitbart News. In 2018, Fox News was rated by Nielsen as America's most watched cable network, averaging a record 2.4 million viewers in prime time and total day during the period of January 1 to December 30, 2018. In an October 2018 Simmons Research survey of the trust in 38 news organizations, Fox News was ranked roughly in the center, with 44.7% of surveyed Americans saying they trusted it. The COVID-19 pandemic led to increased viewership for all cable news networks. For the first calendar quarter of 2020 (January 1 – March 31), Fox News had their highest-rated quarter in the network's history, with Nielsen showing a prime time average total audience of 3.387 million viewers. Sean Hannity's program, Hannity, weeknights at 9 pm ET was the top-rated show in cable news for the quarter averaging 4.2 million viewers, a figure that not only beat out all of its cable news competition but also placed it ahead of network competition in the same time slot. Fox ended the quarter with the top five shows in prime time, with Fox's Tucker Carlson Tonight finishing the quarter in second overall with an average audience of 4.2 million viewers, followed by The Five, The Ingraham Angle, and Special Report with Bret Baier. The Rachel Maddow Show was the highest non-Fox show on cable, coming in sixth place. Finishing the quarter in 22nd place was The Lead with Jake Tapper, CNN's highest rated show. According to a Fox News article on the subject, Fox & Friends averaged 1.8 million viewers, topping CNN's New Day and MSNBC's Morning Joe combined. The same Fox News article said that the Fox Business Network also had its highest-rated quarter in history and that Fox News finished March as the highest-rated network in cable for the 45th consecutive month. According to the Los Angeles Times on August 19, 2020: "Fox News Channel had six of last week's 11 highest-rated prime-time programs to finish first in the network ratings race for the third time since June" 2020. A Morning Consult survey the week after Election Day 2020 showed 30 percent of Republicans in the United States had an unfavorable opinion of Fox News, while 54 percent of Republicans viewed the network favorably, compared to 67 percent before the election. A McClatchy news story suggested criticism from Donald Trump as a major reason, as well as the network's early calling of Arizona for Joe Biden, and later joining other networks in declaring Biden the winner of the 2020 election. Ratings were also down for Fox News. Although it remained ahead of other networks overall, its morning show fell out of first place for the first time since 2001. Trump recommended OANN, which was gaining viewers. Newsmax was also increasing in popularity. Following a decline in ratings after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, in 2021, Fox News regained its lead in cable news ratings ahead of CNN and MSNBC. As indicated by a 2013 New York Times article, based on Nielsen statistics, Fox appears to have a mostly aged demographic. In March 2024, Fox was the most watched news network in total day and prime time viewers in primetime, with 2.135 million/1.306 million viewers respectively, compared to MSNBC with A25-54 demo, 1.307 million in primetime and 830,000 in day viewers, and CNN with 601,000 in primetime and 462,000 in day viewers. In the Adults age 25-54 category, Fox also leads with 246,000 in primetime and 158,000 in day viewers, followed by MSNBC with 133,000 viewers in primetime and 86,000 viewers in day, and CNN with 124,000 viewers in primetime and 85,000 in day viewers. According to the same Nielsen analysis, MSNBC is the second most watched news network. In 2008, in the 25–54 age group, Fox News had an average of 557,000 viewers, but dropped to 379,000 in 2013 while increasing its overall audience from 1.89 million in 2010 to 2.02 million in 2013. The median age of a prime-time viewer was 68 as of 2015[update]. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey showed that among those who named Fox News as their main source for political news, 69% are aged 50 or older. According to a 2013 Gallup poll, 94% of Fox viewers "either identify as or lean Republican". The 2019 Pew survey showed that among people who named Fox News as their main source for political and election news, 93% identify as Republicans. Among the top eight political news sources named by at least 2% of American adults, the results show Fox News and MSNBC as the two news channels with the most partisan audiences. Slogan Fox News Channel originally used the slogan "Fair and Balanced", which was coined by network co-founder Roger Ailes while the network was being established. The New York Times described the slogan as being a "blunt signal that Fox News planned to counteract what Mr. Ailes and many others viewed as a liberal bias ingrained in television coverage by establishment news networks". In a 2013 interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution, Rupert Murdoch defended the company's "Fair and Balanced" slogan, saying, "In fact, you'll find just as many Democrats as Republicans on and so on". In August 2003, Fox News sued comedian Al Franken over his use of the slogan as a subtitle for his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, which is critical of Fox News Channel. The lawsuit was dropped three days later, after Judge Denny Chin refused its request for an injunction. In his decision, Chin ruled the case was "wholly without merit, both factually and legally". He went on to suggest that Fox News' trademark on the phrase "fair and balanced" could be invalid. In December 2003, FNC won a legal battle concerning the slogan, when AlterNet filed a cancellation petition with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to have FNC's trademark rescinded as inaccurate. AlterNet included Robert Greenwald's documentary film Outfoxed (2004) as supporting evidence in its case. After losing early motions, AlterNet withdrew its petition; the USPTO dismissed the case. In 2008, FNC used the slogan "We Report, You Decide", referring to "You Decide 2008" (FNC's original slogan for its coverage of election issues). In August 2016, Fox News Channel began to quietly phase out the "Fair and Balanced" slogan in favor of "Most Watched, Most Trusted"; when these changes were reported in June 2017 by Gabriel Sherman (a writer who had written a biography on Ailes), a network executive said the change "has nothing to do with programming or editorial decisions". It was speculated by media outlets that Fox News Channel was wishing to distance itself from Ailes' tenure at the network. In March 2018, the network introduced a new ad campaign, Real News. Real Honest Opinion. The ad campaign is intended to promote the network's opinion-based programming and counter perceptions surrounding "fake news". In mid-November 2020, following the election, Fox News began to use the slogan "Standing Up For What's Right" to promote its primetime lineup. Content Fox News provided extensive coverage of the 2012 Benghazi attack, which host Sean Hannity described in December 2012 as "the story that the mainstream media ignores" and "obviously, a cover-up. And we will get to the bottom of it." Programming analysis by media watchdog Media Matters, which has declared a "War on Fox News", found that during the twenty months following the Benghazi attacks, FNC ran 1,098 segments on the issue, including: Over nearly four years after the Benghazi attack, there were ten official investigations, including six by Republican-controlled House committees. None of the investigations found any evidence of scandal, cover-up or lying by Obama administration officials. From 2015 into 2018, Fox News broadcast extensive coverage of an alleged scandal surrounding the sale of Uranium One to Russian interests, which host Sean Hannity characterized as "one of the biggest scandals in American history". According to Media Matters, the Fox News coverage extended throughout the programming day, with particular emphasis by Hannity. The network promoted an ultimately unfounded narrative asserting that, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton personally approved the Uranium One sale in exchange for $145 million in bribes paid to the Clinton Foundation. Donald Trump repeated these allegations as a candidate and as president. No evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton had been found after four years of allegations, an FBI investigation, and the 2017 appointment of a Federal attorney to evaluate the investigation. In November 2017, Fox News host Shepard Smith concisely debunked the alleged scandal, infuriating viewers who suggested he should work for CNN or MSNBC. Hannity later called Smith "clueless", while Smith stated: "I get it, that some of our opinion programming is there strictly to be entertaining. I get that. I don't work there. I wouldn't work there." Fox News has been described as conservative media, and as providing biased reporting in favor of conservative political positions, the Republican Party, and President Donald Trump. Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein described Fox News as an expanded part of the Republican Party. Political scientists Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins wrote that Fox News helped "Republicans communicate with their base and spread their ideas, and they have been effective in mobilizing voters to participate in midterm elections (as in 2010 and 2014)." Prior to 2000, Fox News lacked an ideological tilt, and had more Democrats watch the channel than Republicans. During the 2004 United States presidential election, Fox News was markedly more hostile in its coverage of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, and distinguished itself among cable news outlets for heavy coverage of the Swift Boat smear campaign against Kerry. During President Obama's first term in office, Fox News helped launch and amplify the Tea Party movement, a conservative movement within the Republican Party that organized protests against Obama and his policies. In the 2004 documentary Outfoxed, four people identified as former employees said that Fox News made them "slant the news in favor of conservatives". Fox News said that the film misrepresented the employment of these employees. During the Republican primaries, Fox News was perceived as trying to prevent Trump from clinching the nomination. Under Trump's presidency, Fox News remade itself into his image, as hardly any criticism of Trump could be heard on Fox News' prime-time shows. In Fox News' news reporting, the network dedicated far more coverage to Hillary Clinton-related stories, which critics argued was intended to deflect attention from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Trump provided significant access to Fox News during his presidency, giving 19 interviews to the channel while only 6 in total to other news channels by November 2017; The New York Times described Trump's Fox News interviews as "softball interviews" and some of the interviewers' interview styles as "fawning". In July 2018, The Economist has described the network's coverage of Trump's presidency as "reliably fawning". From 2015 to 2017, the Fox News prime-time lineup changed from being skeptical and questioning of Trump to a "Trump safe space, with a dose of Bannonist populism once considered on the fringe". The Fox News website has also become more extreme in its rhetoric since Trump's election; according to Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, the Fox News website has "gone a little Breitbart" over time. At the start of 2018, Fox News mostly ignored high-profile scandals in the Trump administration which received ample coverage in other national media outlets, such as White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter's resignation amid domestic abuse allegations, the downgrading of Jared Kushner's security clearance, and the existence of a non-disclosure agreement between Trump and the porn star Stormy Daniels. In March 2019, Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker that Fox News.com reporter Diana Falzone had the story of the Stormy Daniels–Donald Trump scandal before the 2016 election, but that Fox News executive Ken LaCorte told her: "Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert [Murdoch] wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go." The story was killed; LaCorte denied making the statement to Falzone, but conceded: "I was the person who made the call. I didn't run it upstairs to Roger Ailes or others. ... I didn't do it to protect Donald Trump." She added that "[Falzone] had put up a story that just wasn't anywhere close to being something I was comfortable publishing." Nik Richie, who claimed to be one of the sources for the story, called LaCorte's account "complete bullshit", adding that "Fox News was culpable. I voted for Trump, and I like Fox, but they did their own 'catch and kill' on the story to protect him." A 2008 study found Fox News gave disproportionate attention to polls suggesting low approval for President Bill Clinton. A 2009 study found Fox News was less likely to pick up stories that reflected well on Democrats, and more likely to pick up stories that reflected well on Republicans. A 2010 study comparing Fox News Channel's Special Report With Brit Hume and NBC's Nightly News coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during 2005 concluded "Fox News was much more sympathetic to the administration than NBC", suggesting "if scholars continue to find evidence of a partisan or ideological bias at FNC ... they should consider Fox as alternative, rather than mainstream, media". Research finds that Fox News increases Republican vote shares and makes Republican politicians more partisan. A 2007 study, using the introduction of Fox News into local markets (1996–2000) as an instrumental variable, found that in the 2000 presidential election "Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News", suggesting "Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure". These results were confirmed by a 2015 study. A 2014 study, using the same instrumental variable, found congressional "representatives become less supportive of President Clinton in districts where Fox News begins broadcasting than similar representatives in similar districts where Fox News was not broadcast." Another 2014 paper found Fox News viewing increased Republican vote shares among voters who identified as Republican or independent. A 2017 study, using channel positions as an instrumental variable, found "Fox News increases Republican vote shares by 0.3 points among viewers induced into watching 2.5 additional minutes per week by variation in position." This study used a different methodology for a later period and found an ever bigger effect and impact, leading Matthew Yglesias to write in the Political Communication academic journal that they "suggest that conventional wisdom may be greatly underestimating the significance of Fox as a factor in American politics." Fox News publicly denies it is biased, with Murdoch and Ailes saying to have included Murdoch's statement that Fox has "given room to both sides, whereas only one side had it before". In June 2009, Fox News host Chris Wallace said: "I think we are the counter-weight [to NBC News] ... they have a liberal agenda, and we tell the other side of the story." In 2004, Robert Greenwald's documentary film Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism argued Fox News had a conservative bias and featured clips from Fox News and internal memos from editorial vice president John Moody directing Fox News staff on how to report certain subjects. Fox News' most popular programs such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson do not make any claims to be accurate or fact-checked, and have little to no distinction between news and commentary. A leaked memo from Fox News vice president Bill Sammon to news staff at the height of the health care reform in the United States debate has been cited as an example of the pro-Republican bias of Fox News. His memo asked the staff to "use the term 'government-run health insurance,' or, when brevity is a concern, 'government option,' whenever possible". The memo was sent shortly after Republican pollster Frank Luntz advised Sean Hannity on his Fox show: "If you call it a public option, the American people are split. If you call it the government option, the public is overwhelmingly against it." Surveys suggest Fox News is widely perceived to be ideological. A 2009 Pew survey found Fox News is viewed as the most ideological channel in America, with 47 percent of those surveyed said Fox News is "mostly conservative", 14 percent said "mostly liberal" and 24 percent said "neither". In comparison, MSNBC had 36 percent identify it as "mostly liberal", 11 percent as "mostly conservative" and 27 percent as "neither". CNN had 37 percent describe it as "mostly liberal", 11 percent as "mostly conservative" and 33 percent as "neither". A 2004 Pew Research Center survey found FNC was cited (unprompted) by 69 percent of national journalists as a conservative news organization. A Rasmussen poll found 31 percent of Americans felt Fox News had a conservative bias, and 15 percent that it had a liberal bias. It found 36 percent believed Fox News delivers news with neither a conservative or liberal bias, compared with 37 percent who said NPR delivers news with no conservative or liberal bias and 32 percent who said the same of CNN. David Carr, media critic for The New York Times, praised the 2012 United States presidential election results coverage on Fox News for the network's response to Republican adviser and Fox News contributor Karl Rove challenging its call that Barack Obama would win Ohio and the election. Fox's prediction was correct. Carr wrote: "Over many months, Fox lulled its conservative base with agitprop: that President Obama was a clear failure, that a majority of Americans saw [Mitt] Romney as a good alternative in hard times, and that polls showing otherwise were politically motivated and not to be believed. But on Tuesday night, the people in charge of Fox News were confronted with a stark choice after it became clear that Mr. Romney had fallen short: was Fox, first and foremost, a place for advocacy or a place for news? In this moment, at least, Fox chose news." A May 2017 study conducted by Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy examined coverage of Trump's first 100 days in office by several major mainstream media outlets including Fox. It found Trump received 80% negative coverage from the overall media, and received the least negative coverage on Fox – 52% negative and 48% positive. On March 14, 2017, Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News commentator, claimed on Fox & Friends that British intelligence agency GCHQ had wiretapped Trump on behalf of Barack Obama during the 2016 United States presidential election. On March 16, 2017, White House spokesman Sean Spicer repeated the claim. When Trump was questioned about the claim at a news conference, he said "All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind who was the one responsible for saying that on television. I didn't make an opinion on it." On March 17, 2017, Shepard Smith, a Fox News anchor, admitted the network had no evidence that Trump was under surveillance. British officials said the White House was backing off the claim. Napolitano was later suspended by Fox News for making the claim. In June 2018, Fox News executives instructed producers to head off inappropriate remarks made on the shows aired by the network by hosts and commentators. The instructions came after a number of Fox News hosts and guests made incendiary comments about the Trump administration's policy of separating migrant children from their parents. Fox News host Laura Ingraham had likened the child detention centers that the children were in to "summer camps". Guest Corey Lewandowski mocked the story of a 10-year-old child with Down syndrome being separated from her mother; the Fox News host did not address Lewandowski's statement. Guest Ann Coulter falsely claimed that the separated children were "child actors"; the Fox News host did not challenge her claim. In a segment on Trump's alleged use of racial dog whistles, one Fox News contributor told an African-American whom he was debating: "You're out of your cotton-picking mind." According to the 2016 book Asymmetric Politics by political scientists Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, "Fox News tends to raise the profile of scandals and controversies involving Democrats that receive scant attention in other media, such as the relationship between Barack Obama and William Ayers ... Hillary Clinton's role in the fatal 2012 attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya; the gun-running scandal known as 'Fast and Furious'; the business practices of federal loan guarantee recipient Solyndra; the past activism of Obama White House operative Van Jones; the 2004 attacks on John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; the controversial sermons of Obama's Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright; the filming of undercover videos of supposed wrongdoing by the liberal activist group ACORN; and the 'war on Christmas' supposedly waged every December by secular, multicultural liberals." In October 2018, Fox News ran laudatory coverage of a meeting between Trump-supporting rapper Kanye West and President Trump in the Oval Office. Fox News had previously run negative coverage of rappers and their involvement with Democratic politicians and causes, such as when Fox News ran headlines describing conscious hip-hop artist Common as "vile" and a "cop-killer rapper", and when Fox News ran negative coverage of Kanye West before he became a Trump supporter. On November 4, 2018, Trump's website, DonaldJTrump.com, announced in a press release that Fox News host Sean Hannity would make a "special guest appearance" with Trump at a midterm campaign rally the following night in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The following morning, Hannity tweeted "To be clear, I will not be on stage campaigning with the President." Hannity appeared at the president's lectern on stage at the rally, immediately mocking the "fake news" at the back of the auditorium, Fox News reporters among them. Several Fox News employees expressed outrage at Hannity's actions, with one stating that "a new line was crossed". Hannity later asserted that his action was not pre-planned, and Fox News stated it "does not condone any talent participating in campaign events". Fox News host Jeanine Pirro also appeared on stage with Trump at the rally. The Trump press release was later removed from Trump's website. Fox News released a poll of registered voters, jointly conducted by two polling organizations, on June 16, 2019. The poll found some unfavorable results for Trump, including a record high 50% thought the Trump campaign had coordinated with the Russian government, and 50% thought he should be impeached – 43% saying he should also be removed from office – while 48% said they did not favor impeachment. The next morning on Fox & Friends First, host Heather Childers twice misrepresented the poll results, stating "a new Fox News poll shows most voters don't want impeachment" and "at least half of U.S. voters do not think President Trump should be impeached," while the on-screen display of the actual poll question was also incorrect. Later that morning on America's Newsroom, the on-screen display showed the correct poll question and results, but highlighted the 48% of respondents who opposed impeachment rather than the 50% who supported it (the latter being broken-out into two figures). As host Bill Hemmer drew guest Byron York's attention to the 48% opposed figure, they did not discuss the 50% support figure, while the on-screen chyron read: "Fox News Poll: 43% Support Trump's Impeachment and Removal, 48% Oppose." Later that day, Trump tweeted: "@FoxNews Polls are always bad for me...Something weird going on at Fox." In April 2017, it became known that former Obama administration national security advisor Susan Rice sought the unmasking of Trump associates who were unidentified in intelligence reports, notably Trump's incoming national security advisor Michael Flynn, during the presidential transition. In May 2020, acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist, declassified a list of Obama administration officials who had also requested unmasking of Trump associates, which was subsequently publicly released by Republican senators. That month, attorney general Bill Barr appointed federal prosecutor John Bash to examine the unmaskings. Fox News primetime hosts declared the unmaskings a "domestic spying operation" for which the Obama administration was "exposed" in the "biggest abuse of power" in American history. The Bash inquiry closed months later with no findings of substantive wrongdoing. However, certain Fox personalities have not had as much of a favorable reception from Trump: news anchors Shepard Smith (who retired from Fox in 2019) and Chris Wallace have been criticized by Trump for allegedly being adversarial, alongside Fox analyst Andrew Napolitano, who said Trump's actions in the Trump–Ukraine scandal were "both criminal and impeachable behavior". Trump was also critical of the network hiring former DNC chair Donna Brazile, in 2019. The relationship between Trump and Fox News, as well as other Rupert Murdoch-controlled outlets, soured following the 2020 United States presidential election, as Trump refused to concede that Joe Biden had been elected President-elect. This negative tonal shift led to increased viewership of Newsmax and One America News among Trump and his supporters due to their increased antipathy towards Fox; and as a result, Fox released promotional videos of their opinion hosts disputing the election results, promoting a Trump-affiliated conspiracy theory about voter fraud. By one measure, Newsmax saw a 497% spike in viewership, while Fox News saw a 38% decline. Writing for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in February 2021, senior media writer Tom Jones argued that the primary distinction between Fox News and MSNBC is not right bias vs. left bias, but rather that much of the content on Fox News, especially during its primetime programs, "is not based in truth". The Tampa Bay Times reported in August 2021 that it had reviewed four months of emails indicating Fox News producers had coordinated with aides of Florida governor Ron DeSantis to promote his political prospects by inviting him for frequent network appearances, exchanging talking points and, in one case, helping him to stage an exclusive news event. In February 2024, Alan Rosenblatt of Johns Hopkins University said that Fox News "is an entertainment company that has a news division, not a news company", adding that it "not only does not provide that distinction, it goes out of its way to make it difficult to see the difference. They make their opinion programs look like news programs, and they incorporate enough opinion content on their news programs to further that deception." In early 2024, Fox News host Jesse Watters promoted a conspiracy theory involving Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, and the Democratic Party in hopes of influencing voters ahead of the U.S. presidential primary season. Fox News has published headlines accusing the English Wikipedia of having a left-wing and socialist bias. On October 30, 2017, when special counsel Robert Mueller indicted Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and revealed George Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty (all of whom were involved in the Trump 2016 campaign), this was the focus of most media's coverage, except Fox News'. Hosts and guests on Fox News called for Mueller to be fired. Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson focused their shows on unsubstantiated allegations that Clinton sold uranium to Russia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation and on the Clinton campaign's role in funding the Steele dossier. Hannity asserted: "The very thing they are accusing President Trump of doing, they did it themselves." During the segment, Hannity mistakenly referred to Clinton as President Clinton. Fox News dedicated extensive coverage to the uranium story, which Democrats said was an attempt to distract from Mueller's intensifying investigation. CNN described the coverage as "a tour de force in deflection and dismissal". On October 31, CNN reported Fox News employees were dissatisfied with their outlet's coverage of the Russia investigation, with employees calling it an "embarrassment", "laughable", and saying it "does the viewer a huge disservice and further divides the country" and that it is "another blow to journalists at Fox who come in every day wanting to cover the news in a fair and objective way". When the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election intensified in October 2017, the focus of Fox News coverage turned "what they see as the scandal and wrongdoing of President Trump's political opponents. In reports like these, Bill and Hillary Clinton are prominent and recurring characters because they are considered the real conspirators working with the Russians to undermine American democracy." Paul Waldman of The Washington Post described the coverage as "No puppet. You're the puppet", saying it was a "careful, coordinated, and comprehensive strategy" to distract from Mueller's investigation. German Lopes of Vox said Fox News' coverage has reached "levels of self-parody" as it dedicated coverage to low-key stories, such as a controversial Newsweek op-ed and hamburger emojis, while other networks had wall-to-wall coverage of Mueller's indictments. A FiveThirtyEight analysis of Russia-related media coverage in cable news found most mentions of Russia on Fox News were spoken in close proximity to "uranium" and "dossier". On November 1, 2017, Vox analyzed the transcripts of Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, and found Fox News "was unable to talk about the Mueller investigation without bringing up Hillary Clinton", "talked significantly less about George Papadopoulos—the Trump campaign adviser whose plea deal with Mueller provides the most explicit evidence thus far that the campaign knew of the Russian government's efforts to help Trump—than its competitors", and "repeatedly called Mueller's credibility into question". In December 2017, Fox News escalated its attacks on the Mueller investigation, with hosts and guest commentators suggesting the investigation amounted to a coup. Guest co-host Kevin Jackson referred to a right-wing conspiracy theory claiming Strzok's messages are evidence of a plot by FBI agents to assassinate Trump, a claim which the other Fox co-hosts quickly said is not supported by any credible evidence. Fox News host Jeanine Pirro called the Mueller investigation team a "criminal cabal" and said the team ought to be arrested. Other Fox News figures referred to the investigation as "corrupt", "crooked", and "illegitimate", and likened the FBI to the KGB, the Soviet-era spy organization that routinely tortured and summarily executed people. Political scientists and scholars of coups described the Fox News rhetoric as scary and dangerous. Experts on coups rejected that the Mueller investigation amounted to a coup; rather, the Fox News rhetoric was dangerous to democracy and mirrored the kind of rhetoric that occurs before purges. A number of observers argued the Fox News rhetoric was intended to discredit the Mueller investigation and sway President Donald Trump to fire Mueller. In August 2018, Fox News was criticized for giving more prominent coverage of a murder committed by an undocumented immigrant than the convictions of Donald Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and his long-term personal attorney, Michael Cohen. At the same time, most other national mainstream media gave wall-to-wall coverage of the convictions. Fox News hosts Dana Perrino and Jason Chaffetz argued that voters care far more about the murder than the convictions of the President's former top aides, and hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity downplayed the convictions. In November 2017, following the 2017 New York City truck attack wherein a terrorist shouted "Allahu Akbar", Fox News distorted a statement by Jake Tapper to make it appear as if he had said "Allahu Akbar" can be used under the most "beautiful circumstances". Fox News omitted that Tapper had said the use of "Allahu Akbar" in the terrorist attack was not one of these beautiful circumstances. A headline on FoxNews.com was preceded by a tag reading "OUTRAGEOUS". The Fox News Twitter account distorted the statement further, saying "Jake Tapper Says 'Allahu Akbar' Is 'Beautiful' Right After NYC Terror Attack" in a tweet that was later deleted. Tapper chastised Fox News for choosing to "deliberately lie" and said "there was a time when one could tell the difference between Fox and the nutjobs at Infowars. It's getting tougher and tougher. Lies are lies." In 2009, Tapper had come to the defense of Fox News while he was a White House correspondent for ABC News, after the Obama administration claimed that the network was not a legitimate news organization. Fox News guest host Jason Chaffetz apologized to Tapper for misrepresenting his statement. After Fox News had deleted the tweet, Sean Hannity repeated the misrepresentation and called Tapper "liberal fake news CNN's fake Jake Tapper" and mocked his ratings. In July 2017, a report by Fox & Friends falsely said The New York Times had disclosed intelligence in one of its stories and that this intelligence disclosure helped Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, to evade capture. The report cited an inaccurate assertion by Gen. Tony Thomas, the head of the United States Special Operations Command, that a major newspaper had disclosed the intelligence. Fox News said it was The New York Times, repeatedly running the chyron "NYT Foils U.S. Attempt To Take Out Al-Bahgdadi". Pete Hegseth, one of the show's hosts, criticized the "failing New York Times". President Donald Trump tweeted about the Fox & Friends report shortly after it first aired, saying "The Failing New York Times foiled U.S. attempt to kill the single most wanted terrorist, Al-Baghdadi. Their sick agenda over National Security." Fox News later updated the story, but without apologizing to The New York Times or responding directly to the inaccuracies. In a Washington Post column, Erik Wemple said Chris Wallace had covered The New York Times story himself on Fox News Sunday, adding: "Here's another case of the differing standards between Fox News's opinion operation", which has given "a state-run vibe on all matters related to Trump", compared to Fox News's news operation, which has provided "mostly sane coverage". Fox News has often been described as a major platform for climate change denial.[a] A 2011 study by Lauren Feldman and Anthony Leiserowitz found Fox News "takes a more dismissive tone toward climate change than CNN and MSNBC". A 2008 study found Fox News emphasized the scientific uncertainty of climate change more than CNN, was less likely to say climate change was real, and more likely to interview climate change skeptics. Leaked emails showed that in 2009 Bill Sammon, the Fox News Washington managing editor, instructed Fox News journalists to dispute the scientific consensus on climate change and "refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question." According to climate scientist Michael E. Mann, Fox News "has constructed an alternative universe where the laws of physics no longer apply, where the greenhouse effect is a myth, and where climate change is a hoax, the product of a massive conspiracy among scientists, who somehow have gotten the polar bears, glaciers, sea levels, superstorms, and megadroughts to play along." According to James Lawrence Powell's 2011 study of the climate science denial movement, Fox News provides "the deniers with a platform to say whatever they like without fear of contradiction." Fox News employs Steve Milloy, a prominent climate change denier with close financial and organizational ties to oil companies, as a contributor. In his columns about climate change for FoxNews.com, Fox News has failed to disclose his substantial funding from oil companies. In 2011, the hosts of Fox & Friends described climate change as "unproven science", a "disputed fact", and criticized the Department of Education for working together with the children's network Nickelodeon to teach children about climate change. In 2001, Sean Hannity described the scientific consensus on climate change as "phony science from the left". In 2004, he falsely alleged that "scientists still can't agree on whether the global warming is scientific fact or fiction". In 2010, Hannity said the so-called "Climategate" – the leaking of e-mails by climate scientist that climate change skeptics claimed demonstrated scientific misconduct but which all subsequent enquiries have found no evidence of misconduct or wrongdoing – a "scandal" that "exposed global warming as a myth cooked up by alarmists". Hannity frequently invites contrarian fringe scientists and critics of climate change to his shows. In 2019, a widely shared Fox News news report falsely claimed that new climate science research showed that the Earth might be heading to a new Ice Age; the author of the study that Fox News cited said that Fox News "utterly misrepresents our research" and the study did not in any way suggest that Earth was heading to an Ice Age. Fox News later corrected the story. Shepard Smith drew attention for being one of few voices formerly on Fox News to forcefully state that climate change is real, that human activities are a primary contributor to it and that there is a scientific consensus on the issue. His acceptance of the scientific consensus on climate change drew criticism from Fox News viewers and conservatives. Smith left Fox News in October 2019. In a 2021 interview with Christiane Amanpour on her eponymous show on CNN, he stated that his presence on Fox had become "untenable" due to the "falsehoods" and "lies" intentionally spread on the network's opinion shows. On May 16, 2017, a day when other news organizations were extensively covering Donald Trump's revelation of classified information to Russia, Fox News ran a lead story about a private investigator's uncorroborated claims about the murder of Seth Rich, a DNC staffer. The private investigator said he had uncovered evidence that Rich was in contact with WikiLeaks and law enforcement were covering it up. The killing of Rich has given rise to conspiracy theories in right-wing circles that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party had Seth Rich killed allegedly because he was the source of the DNC leaks. U.S. intelligence agencies determined Russia was the source of the leaks. In reporting the investigator's claims, the Fox News report reignited right-wing conspiracy theories about the killing. The Fox News story fell apart within hours. Other news organizations quickly revealed the investigator was a Donald Trump supporter and had according to NBC News "developed a reputation for making outlandish claims, such as one appearance on Fox News in 2007 in which he warned that underground networks of pink pistol-toting lesbian gangs were raping young women." The family of Seth Rich, the Washington D.C. police department, the Washington D.C. mayor's office, the FBI, and law enforcement sources familiar with the case rebuked the investigator's claims. Rich's relatives said: "We are a family who is committed to facts, not fake evidence that surfaces every few months to fill the void and distract law enforcement and the general public from finding Seth's murderers." The spokesperson for the family criticized Fox News for its reporting, alleging the outlet was motivated by a desire to deflect attention from the Trump-Russia story: "I think there's a very special place in hell for people that would use the memory of a murder victim in order to pursue a political agenda." The family has called for retractions and apologies from Fox News for the inaccurate reporting. Over the course of the day, Fox News altered the contents of the story and the headline, but did not issue corrections. When CNN contacted the private investigator later that day, the investigator said he had no evidence that Rich had contacted WikiLeaks. The investigator claimed he only learned about the possible existence of the evidence from a Fox News reporter. Fox News did not respond to inquiries by CNN, and the Washington Post. Fox News later on May 23, seven days after the story was published, retracted its original report, saying the original report did not meet its standards. Nicole Hemmer, then assistant professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, wrote that the promotion of the conspiracy theory demonstrated how Fox News was "remaking itself in the image of fringe media in the age of Trump, blurring the lines between real and fake news." Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations said while intent behind Fox News, as a counterweight to the liberal media was laudable, the culmination of those efforts have been to create an alternative news source that promotes hoaxes and myths, of which the promotion of the Seth Rich conspiracy is an example. Fox News was also criticized by conservative outlets, such as The Weekly Standard, National Review, and conservative columnists, such as Jennifer Rubin, Michael Gerson, and John Podhoretz. Rich's parents, Joel and Mary Rich, sued Fox News for the emotional distress it had caused them by its false reporting. In 2020, Fox News settled with Rich family, making a payment that was not officially disclosed but which was reported to be in the seven figures. Although the settlement had been agreed to earlier in the year, Fox News arranged to delay the public announcement until after the 2020 presidential election. Fox News hosts and contributors defended Trump's remarks that "many sides" were to blame for violence at a gathering of hundreds of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia. Some criticized Trump. In a press conference on August 15, Trump used the term "alt-left" to describe counterprotesters at the white supremacist rally, a term which had been used in Fox News' coverage of the white supremacist rally. Several of Trump's comments at the press conference mirrored those appearing earlier on Fox News. According to Dylan Byers of CNN, Fox News' coverage on the day of the press conference "was heavy with "whataboutism". The average Fox viewer was likely left with the impression that the media's criticism of Trump and leftist protestors' toppling of some Confederate statues were far greater threats to America than white supremacism or the president's apparent defense of bigotry." Byers wrote "it showed that if Fox News has a line when it comes to Trump's presidency, it was not crossed on Tuesday." During Glenn Beck's tenure at Fox News, he became one of the most high-profile proponents of conspiracy theories about George Soros, a Jewish Hungarian-American businessman and philanthropist known for his donations to American liberal political causes. Beck regularly described Soros as a "puppet-master" and used common anti-Semitic tropes to describe Soros and his activities. In a 2010 three-part series, Beck depicted George Soros as a cartoonish villain trying to "form a shadow government, using humanitarian aid as a cover", and that Soros wanted a one-world government. Beck promoted the false and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Soros was a Nazi collaborator as a 14-year-old in Nazi-occupied Hungary. Beck also characterized Soros's mother as a "wildly anti-Semitic" Nazi collaborator. According to The Washington Post: "Beck's series was largely considered obscene and delusional, if not outright anti-Semitic", but Beck's conspiracy theory became common on the right-wing of American politics. Amid criticism of Beck's false smears, Fox News defended Beck, stating "information regarding Mr. Soros's experiences growing up were taken directly from his writings and from interviews given by him to the media, and no negative opinion was offered as to his actions as a child." Roger Ailes, then-head of Fox News, dismissed criticism levied at Beck by hundreds of rabbis, saying that they were "left-wing rabbis who basically don't think that anybody can ever use the word, Holocaust, on the air." During the first few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, Fox News was considerably more likely than other mainstream news outlets to promote misinformation about COVID-19. The network promoted the narrative that the emergency response to the pandemic was politically motivated or otherwise unwarranted, with Sean Hannity explicitly calling it a "hoax" (he later denied doing so) and other hosts downplaying it. This coverage was consistent with the messaging of Trump at the time. Only in mid March did the network change the tone of its coverage, after President Trump declared a national emergency. At the same time that Fox News commentators downplayed the threat of the virus in public, Fox's management and the Murdoch family took a broad range of internal measures to protect themselves and their employees against it. Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, two of Fox News's primetime hosts, promoted use of the drug hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19, an off-label usage which at the time was supported only by anecdotal evidence, after it was touted by Trump as a possible cure. Fox News promoted a conspiracy theory that coronavirus death toll numbers were inflated with people who would have died anyway from preexisting conditions. This was disputed by White House coronavirus task force members Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, with Fauci describing conspiracy theories as "nothing but distractions" during public health crises. Later in the pandemic, Hannity, Ingraham and Carlson promoted the use of livestock dewormer ivermectin as a possible COVID-19 treatment. Studies have linked trust in Fox News, as well as viewership of Fox News, with fewer preventive behaviors and more risky behaviors related to COVID-19. Once a COVID-19 vaccine became widely available, Fox News consistently questioned the efficacy and safety of the vaccine, celebrated evidence-free skepticism, and blasted attempts to promote vaccinations. More than 90% of Fox Corporation's full-time employees had been fully vaccinated by September 2021. After Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro promoted baseless allegations on her program that voting machine company Smartmatic and its competitor Dominion Voting Systems had conspired to rig the election against Trump. Hosts Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo also promoted the allegations on their programs on sister network Fox Business. In December 2020, Smartmatic sent a letter to Fox News demanding retractions and threatening legal action, specifying that retractions "must be published on multiple occasions" so as to "match the attention and audience targeted with the original defamatory publications." Days later, each of the three programs aired the same three-minute video segment consisting of an interview with an election technology expert who refuted the allegations promoted by the hosts, responding to questions from an unseen and unidentified man. None of the three hosts personally issued retractions. Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion defamation suit against the network, the three hosts, Powell and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani in February 2021. In an April 2021 court brief seeking dismissal of the suit, Fox attorney Paul Clement argued that the network was simply "reporting allegations made by a sitting President and his lawyers." A New York State Supreme Court judge ruled in March 2022 that the suit could proceed, though he dismissed allegations against Sidney Powell and Pirro, and some claims against Giuliani. The judge allowed allegations against Bartiromo and Dobbs to stand. The New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division unanimously rejected a Fox News bid to dismiss the Smartmatic suit in February 2023. The court reinstated defamation allegations against Giuliani and Pirro. In December 2020, Dominion Voting Systems sent a similar letter demanding retractions to Trump attorney Sidney Powell, who had promoted the allegations on Fox programs. On March 26, 2021, Dominion filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, alleging that Fox and some of its pundits spread conspiracy theories about Dominion, and allowed guests to make false statements about the company. On May 18, 2021, Fox News filed a motion to dismiss the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, asserting a First Amendment right "to inform the public about newsworthy allegations of paramount public concern." The motion to dismiss was denied on December 16, 2021, by a Delaware Superior Court judge. In addition to Bartiromo, Dobbs, and Pirro, the suit also names primetime hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. Venezuelan businessman Majed Khalil sued Fox, Dobbs and Powell for $250 million in December 2021, alleging they had falsely implicated him in rigging Dominion and Smartmatic machines. Dobbs and Fox News reached a confidential settlement with Khalil in April 2023. Fox News was the only major network or cable news outlet to not carry the first televised prime time hearing of the January 6 committee live; its regular programming of Tucker Carlson Tonight and Hannity was aired without commercial breaks. During the weeks following the election, Carlson and Hannity often amplified Trump's election falsehoods on their programs; previously disclosed text messages between Hannity and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany were presented during the hearing. Hannity told his audience, "Unlike this committee and their cheerleaders in the media mob, we will actually be telling you the truth," while Carlson said, "This is the only hour on an American news channel that won't be covering their propaganda live. They are lying and we are not going to help them do it." In June 2022, a Delaware Superior Court judge again declined to dismiss the Dominion suit against Fox News, and also allowed Dominion to sue the network's corporate parent, Fox Corporation. The judge ruled that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch may have acted with actual malice because there was a reasonable inference they "either knew Dominion had not manipulated the election or at least recklessly disregarded the truth when they allegedly caused Fox News to propagate its claims about Dominion." He noted a report that Rupert Murdoch spoke with Trump a few days after the election and informed him that he had lost. The New York Times reported in December 2022 that Dominion had acquired communications between Fox News executives and hosts, and between a Fox Corporation employee and the Trump White House, showing they knew that what the network was reporting was untrue. Dominion attorneys said hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, and Fox executives, attested to this in sworn depositions. In November 2020, Hannity hosted Sidney Powell, who asserted Dominion machines had been rigged, but said in his deposition, "I did not believe it for one second." A February 2023 Dominion court filing showed Fox News primetime hosts messaging each other to insult and mock Trump advisers, indicating the hosts knew the allegations made by Powell and Giuliani were false. Rupert Murdoch messaged that Trump's voter fraud claims were "really crazy stuff," telling Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott that it was "terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear." As a January 2021 Georgia runoff election approached that would determine party control of the U.S. Senate, Murdoch told Scott, "Trump will concede eventually and we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can." After the 2016 election, the network developed a cutting-edge system to call elections, which proved very successful during the 2018 midterm elections. The network was the first to call the 2020 Arizona race for Biden, angering many viewers. Washington managing editor Bill Sammon supervised the network's Decision Desk that made the call. Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the network's main news anchors, suggested during a high-level conference call that relying solely on data to make the call was inadequate and that viewer reaction should also be considered; MacCallum said, "in a Trump environment, the game is just very, very different." Sammon stood by the 2020 call and was fired by the network after the January 2021 Georgia runoff. In 2023, Rupert Murdoch was deposed and testified that some Fox News commentators were endorsing election fraud claims they knew were false. In February 2023, Fox's internal communications were released, showing that its presenters and senior executives privately doubted Donald Trump's claims of a stolen election. Chairman Rupert Murdoch once described Trump's voter fraud claims as "really crazy stuff", and also said that Trump advisers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell's television appearances were "terrible stuff damaging everybody". One November 2020 exchange showed Tucker Carlson accusing Powell of "lying ... I caught her. It's insane", with Laura Ingraham responding that "Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy". In another exchange that month, Carlson called for Fox journalist Jacqui Heinrich to be "fired" because she fact-checked Trump and said that there was no evidence of voter fraud from Dominion. Carlson said that Heinrich's actions "needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down", while Heinrich deleted the fact-check the next morning. In March 2023, more of Fox's internal communications were released. One November 2020 communication showed Fox CEO Suzanne Scott criticizing fact-checking, stating that she cannot "keep defending these reporters who don't understand our viewers and how to handle stories ... The audience feels like we crapped on" them, and Fox was losing their audience's "trust and belief" in them. Another December 2020 communication showed Scott responding to Fox presenter Eric Shawn's fact-checking of Donald Trump's false 2020 election claims by demanding that the fact-checking "has to stop now ... This is bad business ... The audience is furious." On March 31, 2023, Delaware Superior Court judge Eric Davis ruled in a summary judgment that it "is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true" and ordered for the case to go to trial. On April 18, 2023, Fox News reached a settlement with Dominion just before the trial started, concluding the lawsuit; Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million, and further stated: "We acknowledge the Court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false". In April 2021, at least five Fox News and Fox Business personalities amplified a story published by the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, that incorrectly linked a university study to President Joe Biden's climate change agenda, to falsely assert that Americans would be compelled to dramatically reduce their meat consumption to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions caused by flatulence. Fox News aired a graphic detailing the supposed compulsory reductions, falsely indicating the information came from the Agriculture Department, which numerous Republican politicians and commentators tweeted. Fox News anchor John Roberts reported to "say goodbye to your burgers if you want to sign up to the Biden climate agenda." Days later, Roberts acknowledged on air that the story was false. According to analysis by Media Matters, on May 12, 2021, Fox News reported on its website: "Biden resumes border wall construction after promising to halt it". Correspondent Bill Melugin then appeared on Special Report with Bret Baier to report "the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is actually going to be restarting border wall construction down in the Rio Grande Valley" after "a lot of blowback and pressure from local residents and local politicians." After the Corps of Engineers tweeted a clarification, Melugin deleted a tweet about the story and tweeted an "update" clarifying that a levee wall was being constructed to mitigate damage to flood control systems caused by uncompleted wall construction, and the website story headline was changed to "Biden administration to resume border wall levee construction as crisis worsens." Later on Fox News Primetime, host Brian Kilmeade briefly noted the levee but commented to former Trump advisor Stephen Miller: "They're going to restart building the wall again, Stephen." Fox News host Sean Hannity later broadcast the original Melugin story without any mention of the levee. Media Matters reported in September 2024 that during the Biden presidency Fox News had promoted a false "crime crisis" narrative, particularly directed toward undocumented migrants, which reflected Donald Trump's political rhetoric. The Fox News narrative consisted of reported violent crime anecdotes rather than FBI crime rate statistics showing violent crime had declined significantly since 2020. One Fox host, Ainsley Earhardt, said that even if the FBI data were right, "we're all a little bit more scared than we used to be." Later that month, weeks before the 2024 presidential election, the FBI released crime data for 2023 showing that violent crime had declined 3% from 2022. The report was widely covered by mainstream news outlets that day, though the Fox News coverage was limited to a 28-second segment by evening anchor Bret Baier. He reported "critics say the report is not accurate because it does not include big cities," echoing a false assertion made by Elon Musk and other Trump supporters on social media. Controversies The network has been accused of permitting sexual harassment and racial discrimination by on-air hosts, executives, and employees, paying out millions of dollars in legal settlements. Prominent Fox News figures such as Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly and Eric Bolling were fired after many women accused them of sexual harassment. At least four lawsuits alleged Fox News co-president Bill Shine ignored, enabled or concealed Roger Ailes' alleged sexual harassment. Fox News CEO Rupert Murdoch has dismissed the high-profile sexual misconduct allegations as "largely political" and speculated they were made "because we are conservative". Bill O'Reilly and Fox News settled six agreements, totaling $45 million, with women who accused O'Reilly of sexual harassment. In January 2017, shortly after Bill O'Reilly settled a sexual harassment lawsuit for $32 million ("an extraordinarily large amount for such cases"), Fox News renewed Bill O'Reilly's contract. Fox News's parent company, 21st Century Fox, said it was aware of the lawsuit. The contract between O'Reilly and Fox News read he could not be fired from the network unless sexual harassment allegations were proven in court. Fox News's extensive coverage of the Harvey Weinstein scandal in October 2017 was seen by some as hypocritical. Fox News dedicated at least 12 hours of coverage to the Weinstein scandal, yet only dedicated 20 minutes to Bill O'Reilly, who just like Weinstein had been accused of sexual harassment by a multitude of women. A few weeks later, when a number of females under the age of 18, including a 14-year-old, accused Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore of making sexual advances, Hannity dismissed the sexual misconduct allegations and dedicated coverage on his television show to casting doubt on the accusers. Other prime-time Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham queried The Washington Post's reporting or opted to bring up sexual misconduct allegations regarding show business figures such as Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K. Fox News figures Jeanine Pirro and Gregg Jarrett questioned both the validity of The Washington Post's reporting and that of the women. In December 2017, a few days before the Alabama Senate election, Fox News, along with the conspiracy websites Breitbart News and The Gateway Pundit, ran an inaccurate headline which claimed one of Roy Moore's accusers admitted to forging an inscription by Roy Moore in her yearbook; Fox News later added a correction to the story. A number of Fox News hosts have welcomed Bill O'Reilly to their shows and paid tributes to Roger Ailes after his death. In May 2017, Hannity called Ailes "a second father" and said to Ailes's "enemies" that he was "preparing to kick your a** in the next life". Ailes had the year before been fired from Fox News after women alleged he sexually harassed them. In September 2017, several months after Bill O'Reilly was fired from Fox News in the wake of women alleging he sexually harassed them, Hannity hosted O'Reilly on his show. Some Fox News employees criticized the decision. According to CNN, during the interview, Hannity found kinship with O'Reilly as he appeared "to feel that he and O'Reilly have both become victims of liberals looking to silence them." In September 2009, the Obama administration engaged in a verbal conflict with Fox News Channel. On September 20, President Barack Obama appeared on all major news programs except Fox News, a snub partially in response to remarks about him by commentators Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Fox coverage of Obama's health-care proposal. In late September 2009, Obama's senior advisor David Axelrod and Roger Ailes met in secret to attempt to smooth out tensions between the two camps. Two weeks later, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel referred to FNC as "not a news network" and communications director Anita Dunn said "Fox News often operates as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party". Obama commented: "If media is operating basically as a talk radio format, then that's one thing, and if it's operating as a news outlet, then that's another." Emanuel said it was important "to not have the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led in following Fox". Within days, it was reported that Fox had been excluded from an interview with administration official Ken Feinberg, with bureau chiefs from the White House press pool (ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN) coming to Fox's defense. A bureau chief said: "If any member had been excluded it would have been the same thing, it has nothing to do with Fox or the White House or the substance of the issues." Shortly after the story broke, the White House admitted to a low-level mistake, saying Fox had not made a specific request to interview Feinberg. Fox White House correspondent Major Garrett said he had not made a specific request, but had a "standing request from me as senior White House correspondent on Fox to interview any newsmaker at the Treasury at any given time news is being made". On November 8, 2009, the Los Angeles Times reported an unnamed Democratic consultant was warned by the White House not to appear on Fox News again. According to the article, Dunn claimed in an e-mail to have checked with colleagues who "deal with TV issues" who denied telling anyone to avoid Fox. Patrick Caddell, a Fox News contributor and former pollster for President Jimmy Carter, said he had spoken with other Democratic consultants who had received similar warnings from the White House. On October 2, 2013, Fox News host Anna Kooiman cited on the air a fake story from the National Report parody site, which claimed Obama had offered to keep the International Museum of Muslim Cultures open with cash from his own pocket. Fox News attracted controversy in April 2018 when it was revealed primetime host Sean Hannity had defended Trump's then personal attorney Michael Cohen on air without disclosing Cohen was his lawyer. On April 9, 2018, federal agents from the U.S. Attorney's office served a search warrant on Cohen's office and residence. On the air, Hannity defended Cohen and criticized the federal action, calling it "highly questionable" and "an unprecedented abuse of power". On April 16, 2018, in a court hearing, Cohen's lawyers told the judge that Cohen had ten clients in 2017–2018 but did "traditional legal tasks" for only three, including Trump. The federal judge ordered the revelation of the third client, whom Cohen's lawyers named as Hannity. Hannity was not sanctioned by Fox News for this breach of journalistic ethics, with Fox News releasing a statement that the channel was unaware of Hannity's relationship to Cohen and that it had "spoken to Sean and he continues to have our full support." Media ethics experts said that Hannity's disclosure failure was a major breach of journalistic ethics and that the network should have suspended or fired him for it. In mid-2021, Fox News agreed to pay a $1 million settlement to New York City after its Commission on Human Rights cited "a pattern of violating the NYC Human Rights Law". A Fox News spokesperson claimed that "FOX News Media has already been in full compliance across the board, but [settled] to continue enacting extensive preventive measures against all forms of discrimination and harassment." International transmission The Fox News Channel feed has international availability via multiple providers, while Fox Extra segments provide alternate programming. Fox News is carried in more than 40 countries. In Australia, FNC is broadcast on the dominant pay television provider Foxtel. FNC reached Brazil through Sky Brasil on November 1, 2002, after being introduced at ABTA 2002. Commercials on FNC are replaced with Fox Extra. It is available on Vivo TV. Fox had initially planned to launch a joint venture with Canwest's Global Television Network, tentatively named Fox News Canada, which would have featured a mixture of U.S. and Canadian news programming. As a result, the CRTC denied a 2003 application requesting permission for Fox News Channel to be carried in Canada. However, in March 2004, a Fox executive said the venture had been shelved; in November of that year, the CRTC added Fox News to its whitelist of foreign channels that may be carried by television providers. In May 2023, the CRTC announced that it would open a public consultation regarding the channel's carriage in Canada, acting upon complaints by the LGBT advocacy group Egale Canada surrounding an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight that contained content described as "malicious misinformation" regarding trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and two-spirit communities, including "the inflammatory and false claim that trans people are 'targeting' Christians." It is available through streaming service Disney+ Hotstar. In Indonesia, it is available on Channel 397 on pay-TV provider First Media. In Israel, FNC is broadcast on Channel 105 of the satellite provider Yes, as well as being carried on Cellcom TV and Partner TV. It is also broadcast on channel 200 on cable operator HOT. In Italy, FNC is broadcast on Sky Italia. Fox News was launched on Stream TV in 2001, and moved to Sky Italia in 2003. Although service to Japan ceased in summer 2003, it can still be seen on Americable (distributor for American bases), Mediatti (Kadena Air Base) and Pan Global TV Japan. The channel's international feed is being carried by cable provider Izzi Telecom. In the Netherlands, Fox News has been carried by cable providers UPC Nederland and CASEMA, and satellite provider Canaldigitaal; all have dropped the channel in recent years. At this time, only cable provider Caiway (available in a limited number of towns in the central part of the country) is broadcasting the channel. The channel was also carried by IPTV provider KNIPPR (owned by T-Mobile). In New Zealand, FNC is broadcast on Channel 088 of pay satellite operator SKY Network Television's digital platform. It was formerly broadcast overnight on free-to-air UHF New Zealand TV channel Prime; this was discontinued in January 2010, reportedly due to an expiring broadcasting license. In Pakistan, Fox News Channel is available on PTCL Smart TV and a number of cable and IPTV operators. In the Philippines, Fox News Channel is available on Sky Cable, Cablelink and G Sat Channel 50. It was available on Cignal until January 1, 2021, due to contract expiration; however, the channel returned on June 16, 2022. In Portugal, Fox News was available on Meo. The channel is however no longer available on the operator and it is not carried by other Portuguese TV operators. Between 2003 and 2006, in Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, FNC was broadcast 16 hours a day on TV8 (with Fox News Extra segments replacing U.S. advertising). Fox News was dropped by TV8 in September 2006. In Singapore, FNC is broadcast on pay-TV operator StarHub TV, as well on Singtel TV. In South Africa, FNC is broadcast on StarSat. The most popular pay television operator, DStv, does not offer FNC in its channel bouquet. In Spain, Fox News was available on Movistar Plus+. The channel was part of the operator since its first incarnation as Canal Satellite Digital in the early 2000s, but was later removed from the operator's satellite offer by March 2023, and ceased transmission to the remaining offers on July 9, 2024. The channel is not carried by other Spanish TV operators. FNC was carried in the United Kingdom by Sky. On August 29, 2017, Sky dropped Fox News; the broadcaster said its carriage was not "commercially viable" due to average viewership of fewer than 2,000 viewers per day. The company said the decision was unrelated to 21st Century Fox's proposed acquisition of the remainder of Sky plc (which ultimately led to a bidding war that resulted in its acquisition by Comcast instead). The potential co-ownership had prompted concerns from critics of the deal, who felt Sky News could similarly undergo a shift to an opinionated format with a right-wing viewpoint. However, such a move would violate Ofcom broadcast codes, which requires all news programming to show due impartiality. The channel's broadcasts in the country have violated this rule on several occasions. Notable personalities See also Notes References Further reading External links |
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Contents The New York Times The New York Times (NYT)[b] is a newspaper based in Manhattan, New York City. The New York Times covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces and reviews. As one of the longest-running newspapers in the United States, the Times serves as one of the country's newspapers of record. As of August 2025[update], The New York Times had 11.88 million total and 11.3 million online subscribers, both by significant margins the highest numbers for any newspaper in the United States; the total also included 580,000 print subscribers. The New York Times is published by the New York Times Company; since 1896, the company has been chaired by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, whose current chairman and the paper's publisher is A. G. Sulzberger. The Times is headquartered at The New York Times Building in Midtown Manhattan. The Times was founded as the conservative New-York Daily Times in 1851, and came to national recognition in the 1870s with its aggressive coverage of corrupt politician Boss Tweed. Following the Panic of 1893, Chattanooga Times publisher Adolph Ochs gained a controlling interest in the company. In 1935, Ochs was succeeded by his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who began a push into European news. Sulzberger's son Arthur Ochs Sulzberger became publisher in 1963, adapting to a changing newspaper industry and introducing radical changes. The New York Times was involved in the landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which restricted the ability of public officials to sue the media for defamation. In 1971, The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, an internal Department of Defense document detailing the United States's historical involvement in the Vietnam War, despite pushback from then-president Richard Nixon. In the landmark decision New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment guaranteed the right to publish the Pentagon Papers. In the 1980s, the Times began a two-decade progression to digital technology and launched nytimes.com in 1996. In the 21st century, it shifted its publication online amid the global decline of newspapers. Currently, the Times maintains several regional bureaus staffed with journalists across six continents. It has expanded to several other publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times International Edition, and The New York Times Book Review. In addition, the paper has produced several television series, podcasts—including The Daily—and games through The New York Times Games. The New York Times has been involved in a number of controversies in its history. Among other accolades, it has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize 135 times since 1918, the most of any publication. According to a 2025 Pew Research Center study on educational differences among audiences of 30 major U.S. news outlets, The New York Times had the highest proportion of college-educated readers among the daily newspapers surveyed, with 56% of its audience holding at least a bachelor's degree. History The New York Times was established in 1851 as the New-York Daily Times by New-York Tribune journalists Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones. The Times experienced significant circulation, particularly among conservatives; New-York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley praised the Times. During the American Civil War, Times correspondents gathered information directly from Confederate states. In 1869, Jones inherited the paper from Raymond, who had changed its name to The New-York Times. Under Jones, the Times began to publish a series of articles criticizing Tammany Hall political boss William M. Tweed, despite vehement opposition from other New York newspapers. In 1871, The New-York Times published Tammany Hall's accounting books; Tweed was tried in 1873 and sentenced to twelve years in prison. The Times earned national recognition for its coverage of Tweed. In 1891, Jones died, creating a management imbroglio in which his children had insufficient business acumen to inherit the company and his will prevented an acquisition of the Times. Editor-in-chief Charles Ransom Miller, editorial editor Edward Cary, and correspondent George F. Spinney established a company to manage The New-York Times, but faced financial difficulties during the Panic of 1893. In August 1896, Chattanooga Times publisher Adolph Ochs acquired The New-York Times, implementing significant alterations to the newspaper's structure. Ochs established the Times as a merchant's newspaper and removed the hyphen from the newspaper's name. In 1905, The New York Times opened Times Tower, marking expansion. The Times experienced a political realignment in the 1910s amid several disagreements within the Republican Party. The New York Times reported on the sinking of the Titanic, as other newspapers were cautious about bulletins circulated by the Associated Press. Through managing editor Carr Van Anda, the Times paid considerable attention to advances in science, reporting on Albert Einstein's then-obscure theory of general relativity and becoming involved in the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. In April 1935, Ochs died, leaving his son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger as publisher. The Great Depression forced Sulzberger to reduce The New York Times's operations, and developments in the New York newspaper landscape resulted in the formation of larger newspapers, such as the New York Herald Tribune and the New York World-Telegram. In contrast to Ochs, Sulzberger encouraged wirephotography. The New York Times extensively covered World War II through large headlines, reporting on exclusive stories such as the Yugoslav coup d'état. Amid the war, Sulzberger began expanding the Times's operations further, acquiring WQXR-FM in 1944—the first non-Times investment since the Jones era—and established a fashion show in Times Hall. Despite reductions as a result of conscription, The New York Times retained the largest journalism staff of any newspaper. The Times's print edition became available internationally during the war through the Army & Air Force Exchange Service; The New York Times Overseas Weekly later became available in Japan through The Asahi Shimbun and in Germany through the Frankfurter Zeitung. The international edition would develop into a separate newspaper. Journalist William L. Laurence publicized the atomic bomb race between the United States and Germany, resulting in the Federal Bureau of Investigation seizing copies of the Times. The United States government recruited Laurence to document the Manhattan Project in April 1945. Laurence became the only witness of the Manhattan Project, a detail realized by employees of The New York Times following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Following World War II, The New York Times continued to expand. The Times was subject to investigations from the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, a McCarthyist subcommittee that investigated purported communism from within press institutions. Arthur Hays Sulzberger's decision to dismiss a copyreader who had pleaded the Fifth Amendment drew ire from within the Times and from external organizations. In April 1961, Sulzberger resigned, appointing his son-in-law, The New York Times Company president Orvil Dryfoos. Under Dryfoos, The New York Times established a newspaper based in Los Angeles. In 1962, the implementation of automated printing presses in response to increasing costs mounted fears over technological unemployment. The New York Typographical Union staged a strike in December, altering the media consumption of New Yorkers. The strike left New York with three remaining newspapers—the Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post—by its conclusion in March 1963. In May, Dryfoos died of a heart ailment. Following weeks of ambiguity, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger became The New York Times's publisher. Technological advancements leveraged by newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and improvements in coverage from The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal necessitated adaptations to nascent computing. The New York Times published "Heed Their Rising Voices" in 1960, a full-page advertisement purchased by supporters of Martin Luther King Jr. criticizing law enforcement in Montgomery, Alabama for their response to the civil rights movement. Montgomery Public Safety commissioner L. B. Sullivan sued the Times for defamation. In New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the verdict in Alabama county court and the Supreme Court of Alabama violated the First Amendment. The decision is considered to be landmark. After financial losses, The New York Times ended its international edition, acquiring a stake in the Paris Herald Tribune, forming the International Herald Tribune. The Times initially published the Pentagon Papers, facing opposition from then-president Richard Nixon. The Supreme Court ruled in The New York Times's favor in New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), allowing the Times and The Washington Post to publish the papers. The New York Times remained cautious in its initial coverage of the Watergate scandal. As Congress began investigating the scandal, the Times furthered its coverage, publishing details on the Huston Plan, alleged wiretapping of reporters and officials, and testimony from James W. McCord Jr. that the Committee for the Re-Election of the President paid the conspirators off. The exodus of readers to suburban New York newspapers, such as Newsday and Gannett papers, adversely affected The New York Times's circulation. Contemporary newspapers balked at additional sections; Time devoted a cover for its criticism and New York wrote that the Times was engaging in "middle-class self-absorption". The New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post were the subject of a strike in 1978, allowing emerging newspapers to leverage halted coverage. The Times deliberately avoided coverage of the AIDS epidemic, running its first front-page article in May 1983. Max Frankel's editorial coverage of the epidemic, with mentions of anal intercourse, contrasted with then-executive editor A. M. Rosenthal's puritan approach, intentionally avoiding descriptions of the luridity of gay venues. Following years of waning interest in The New York Times, Sulzberger resigned in January 1992, appointing his son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., as publisher. The Internet represented a generational shift within the Times; Sulzberger, who negotiated The New York Times Company's acquisition of The Boston Globe in 1993, derided the Internet, while his son expressed antithetical views. @times appeared on America Online's website in May 1994 as an extension of The New York Times, featuring news articles, film reviews, sports news, and business articles. Despite opposition, several employees of the Times had begun to access the Internet. The online success of publications that traditionally co-existed with the Times—such as America Online, Yahoo, and CNN—and the expansion of websites such as Monster.com and Craigslist that threatened The New York Times's classified advertisement model increased efforts to develop a website. nytimes.com debuted on January 19 and was formally announced three days later. The Times published domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski's essay Industrial Society and Its Future in 1995, contributing to his arrest after his brother David recognized the essay's penmanship. Following the establishment of nytimes.com, The New York Times retained its journalistic hesitancy under executive editor Joseph Lelyveld, refusing to publish an article reporting on the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal from Drudge Report. nytimes.com editors conflicted with print editors on several occasions, including wrongfully naming security guard Richard Jewell as the suspect in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing and covering the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in greater detail than the print edition. The New York Times Electronic Media Company was adversely affected by the dot-com crash. The Times extensively covered the September 11 attacks. The following day's print issue contained sixty-six articles, the work of over three hundred dispatched reporters. Journalist Judith Miller was the recipient of a package containing a white powder during the 2001 anthrax attacks, furthering anxiety within The New York Times. In September 2002, Miller and military correspondent Michael R. Gordon wrote an article for the Times claiming that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes. The article was cited by then-president George W. Bush to claim that Iraq was constructing weapons of mass destruction; the theoretical use of aluminum tubes to produce nuclear material was speculation. In March 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, beginning the Iraq War. The New York Times attracted controversy after thirty-six articles from journalist Jayson Blair were discovered to be plagiarized. Criticism over then-executive editor Howell Raines and then-managing editor Gerald M. Boyd mounted following the scandal, culminating in a town hall in which a deputy editor criticized Raines for failing to question Blair's sources in article he wrote on the D.C. sniper attacks. In June 2003, Raines and Boyd resigned. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. appointed Bill Keller as executive editor. Miller continued to report on the Iraq War as a journalistic embed covering the country's weapons of mass destruction program. Keller and then-Washington bureau chief Jill Abramson unsuccessfully attempted to subside criticism. Conservative media criticized the Times over its coverage of missing explosives from the Al Qa'qaa weapons facility. An article in December 2005 disclosing warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency contributed to further criticism from the George W. Bush administration and the Senate's refusal to renew the Patriot Act. In the Plame affair, a Central Intelligence Agency inquiry found that Miller had become aware of Valerie Plame's identity through then-vice president Dick Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby, resulting in Miller's resignation. During the Great Recession, The New York Times suffered significant fiscal difficulties as a consequence of the subprime mortgage crisis and a decline in classified advertising. Exacerbated by Rupert Murdoch's revitalization of The Wall Street Journal through his acquisition of Dow Jones & Company, The New York Times Company began enacting measures to reduce the newsroom budget. The company was forced to borrow $250 million (equivalent to $373.84 million in 2025) from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and fired over one hundred employees by 2010. nytimes.com's coverage of the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal, resulting in the resignation of then-New York governor Eliot Spitzer, furthered the legitimacy of the website as a journalistic medium. The Times's economic downturn renewed discussions of an online paywall; The New York Times implemented a paywall in March 2011. Abramson succeeded Keller, continuing her characteristic investigations into corporate and government malfeasance into the Times's coverage. Following conflicts with newly appointed chief executive Mark Thompson's ambitions, Abramson was dismissed by Sulzberger Jr., who named Dean Baquet as her replacement. Leading up to the 2016 presidential election, The New York Times elevated the Hillary Clinton email controversy into a national issue. Donald Trump's upset victory contributed to an increase in subscriptions to the Times. The New York Times experienced unprecedented indignation from Trump, who referred to publications such as the Times as "enemies of the people" at the Conservative Political Action Conference and tweeted his disdain for the newspaper and CNN. In October 2017, The New York Times published an article by journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey alleging that dozens of women had accused film producer and The Weinstein Company co-chairman Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct. The investigation resulted in Weinstein's resignation and conviction, precipitated the Weinstein effect, and served as a catalyst for the #MeToo movement. The New York Times Company vacated the public editor position and eliminated the copy desk in November. Sulzberger Jr. announced his resignation in December 2017, appointing his son, A. G. Sulzberger, as publisher. Trump's relationship—equally diplomatic and negative—marked Sulzberger's tenure. In September 2018, The New York Times published "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration", an anonymous essay by a self-described Trump administration official later revealed to be Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor. The animosity—which extended to nearly three hundred instances of Trump disparaging the Times by May 2019—culminated in Trump ordering federal agencies to cancel their subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post in October 2019. Trump's tax returns have been the subject of three separate investigations.[c] During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Times began implementing data services and graphs. On May 23, 2020, The New York Times's front page solely featured U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss, a subset of the 100,000 people in the United States who died of COVID-19, the first time that the Times's front page lacked images since they were introduced. Since 2020, The New York Times has focused on broader diversification, developing online games and producing television series. The New York Times Company acquired The Athletic in January 2022. Organization Since 1896, The New York Times has been published by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, having previously been published by Henry Jarvis Raymond until 1869 and by George Jones until 1896. Adolph Ochs published the Times until his death in 1935, when he was succeeded by his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Sulzberger was publisher until 1961 and was succeeded by Orvil Dryfoos, his son-in-law, who served in the position until his death in 1963. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger succeeded Dryfoos until his resignation in 1992. His son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., served as publisher until 2018. The New York Times's current publisher is A. G. Sulzberger, Sulzberger Jr.'s son. As of 2023, the Times's executive editor is Joseph Kahn and the paper's managing editors are Marc Lacey and Carolyn Ryan, having been appointed in June 2022. The New York Times's deputy managing editors are Sam Dolnick, Monica Drake, and Steve Duenes, and the paper's assistant managing editors are Matthew Ericson, Jonathan Galinsky, Hannah Poferl, Sam Sifton, Karron Skog, and Michael Slackman. The New York Times is owned by The New York Times Company, a publicly traded company. The New York Times Company, in addition to the Times, owns Wirecutter, The Athletic, The New York Times Cooking, and The New York Times Games, and acquired Serial Productions and Audm. The New York Times Company holds undisclosed minority investments in multiple other businesses, and formerly owned The Boston Globe and several radio and television stations. The New York Times Company is majority-owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family through elevated shares in the company's dual-class stock structure held largely in a trust, in effect since the 1950s; as of 2022, the family holds ninety-five percent of The New York Times Company's Class B shares, allowing it to elect seventy percent of the company's board of directors. Class A shareholders have restrictive voting rights. As of 2023, The New York Times Company's chief executive is Meredith Kopit Levien, the company's former chief operating officer who was appointed in September 2020. As of March 2023, The New York Times Company employs 5,800 individuals, including 1,700 journalists according to deputy managing editor Sam Dolnick. Journalists for The New York Times may not run for public office, provide financial support to political candidates or causes, endorse candidates, or demonstrate public support for causes or movements. Journalists are subject to the guidelines established in "Ethical Journalism" and "Guidelines on Integrity". According to the former, Times journalists must abstain from using sources with a personal relationship to them and must not accept reimbursements or inducements from individuals who may be written about in The New York Times, with exceptions for gifts of nominal value. The latter requires attribution and exact quotations, though exceptions are made for linguistic anomalies. Staff writers are expected to ensure the veracity of all written claims, but may delegate researching obscure facts to the research desk. In March 2021, the Times established a committee to avoid journalistic conflicts of interest with work written for The New York Times, following columnist David Brooks's resignation from the Aspen Institute for his undisclosed work on the initiative Weave. The New York Times editorial board was established in 1896 by Adolph Ochs. With the opinion department, the editorial board is independent of the newsroom. Then-editor-in-chief Charles Ransom Miller served as opinion editor from 1883 until his death in 1922. Rollo Ogden succeeded Miller until his death in 1937. From 1937 to 1938, John Huston Finley served as opinion editor; in a prearranged plan, Charles Merz succeeded Finley. Merz served in the position until his retirement in 1961. John Bertram Oakes served as opinion editor from 1961 to 1976, when then-publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger appointed Max Frankel. Frankel served in the position until 1986, when he was appointed as executive editor. Jack Rosenthal was the opinion editor from 1986 to 1993. Howell Raines succeeded Rosenthal until 2001, when he was made executive editor. Gail Collins succeeded Raines until her resignation in 2006. From 2007 to 2016, Andrew Rosenthal was the opinion editor. James Bennet succeeded Rosenthal until his resignation in 2020. As of July 2024[update], the editorial board comprises thirteen opinion writers. The New York Times's opinion editor is Kathleen Kingsbury and the deputy opinion editor is Patrick Healy. The New York Times's editorial board was initially opposed to liberal beliefs, opposing women's suffrage in 1900 and 1914. The editorial board began to espouse progressive beliefs during Oakes's tenure, conflicting with the Ochs-Sulzberger family, of which Oakes was a member as Adolph Ochs's nephew; in 1976, Oakes publicly disagreed with Sulzberger's endorsement of Daniel Patrick Moynihan over Bella Abzug in the 1976 Senate Democratic primaries in a letter sent from Martha's Vineyard. Under Rosenthal, the editorial board took positions supporting assault weapons legislation and the legalization of marijuana, but publicly criticized the Obama administration over its portrayal of terrorism. In presidential elections, The New York Times has endorsed a total of twelve Republican candidates and thirty-two Democratic candidates, and has endorsed the Democrat in every election since 1960.[j] With the exception of Wendell Willkie, Republicans endorsed by the Times have won the presidency. In 2016, the editorial board issued an anti-endorsement against Donald Trump for the first time in its history. In February 2020, the editorial board reduced its presence from several editorials each day to occasional editorials for events deemed particularly significant. Since August 2024, the board no longer endorses candidates in local or congressional races in New York. Since 1940, editorial, media, and technology workers of The New York Times have been represented by the New York Times Guild. The Times Guild, along with the Times Tech Guild, are represented by the NewsGuild-CWA. In 1940, Arthur Hays Sulzberger was called upon by the National Labor Relations Board amid accusations that he had discouraged Guild membership in the Times. Over the next few years, the Guild would ratify several contracts, expanding to editorial and news staff in 1942 and maintenance workers in 1943. The New York Times Guild has walked out several times in its history, including for six and a half hours in 1981 and in 2017, when copy editors and reporters walked out at lunchtime in response to the elimination of the copy desk. On December 7, 2022, the union held a one-day strike, the first interruption to The New York Times since 1978. The New York Times Guild reached an agreement in May 2023 to increase minimum salaries for employees and a retroactive bonus. The Times Tech Guild is the largest technology union with collective bargaining rights in the United States. The guild held a second strike beginning on November 4, 2024, threatening the Times's coverage of the 2024 United States presidential election. Content As of August 2025, The New York Times has 11.8 million subscribers, with 11.3 million online-only subscribers and 580,000 print subscribers. The New York Times Company intends to have 15 million subscribers by 2027. The Times's shift towards subscription-based revenue with the debut of an online paywall in 2011 contributed to subscription revenue exceeding advertising revenue the following year, furthered by the 2016 presidential election and Donald Trump. In 2022, Vox wrote that The New York Times's subscribers skew "older, richer, whiter, and more liberal"; to reflect the general population of the United States, the Times has attempted to alter its audience by acquiring The Athletic, investing in verticals such as The New York Times Games, and beginning a marketing campaign showing diverse subscribers to the Times. The New York Times Company chief executive Meredith Kopit Levien stated that the average age of subscribers has remained constant. In October 2001, The New York Times began publishing DealBook, a financial newsletter edited by Andrew Ross Sorkin. The Times had intended to publish the newsletter in September, but delayed its debut following the September 11 attacks. A website for DealBook was established in March 2006. The New York Times began shifting towards DealBook as part of the newspaper's financial coverage in November 2010 with a renewed website and a presence in the Times's print edition. In 2011, the Times began hosting the DealBook Summit, an annual conference hosted by Sorkin. During the COVID-19 pandemic, The New York Times hosted the DealBook Online Summit in 2020 and 2021. The 2022 DealBook Summit featured—among other speakers—former vice president Mike Pence and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, culminating in an interview with former FTX chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried; FTX had filed for bankruptcy several weeks prior. The 2023 DealBook Summit's speakers included vice president Kamala Harris, Israeli president Isaac Herzog, and businessman Elon Musk. In June 2010, The New York Times licensed the political blog FiveThirtyEight in a three-year agreement. The blog, written by Nate Silver, had garnered attention during the 2008 presidential election for predicting the elections in forty-nine of fifty states. FiveThirtyEight appeared on nytimes.com in August. According to Silver, several offers were made for the blog; Silver wrote that a merger of unequals must allow for editorial sovereignty and resources from the acquirer, comparing himself to Groucho Marx. According to The New Republic, FiveThirtyEight drew as much as a fifth of the traffic to nytimes.com during the 2012 presidential election. In July 2013, FiveThirtyEight was sold to ESPN. In an article following Silver's exit, public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote that he was disruptive to the Times's culture for his perspective on probability-based predictions and scorn for polling—having stated that punditry is "fundamentally useless", comparing him to Billy Beane, who implemented sabermetrics in baseball. According to Sullivan, his work was criticized by several notable political journalists. The New Republic obtained a memo in November 2013 revealing then-Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt's ambitions to establish a data-driven newsletter with presidential historian Michael Beschloss, graphic designer Amanda Cox, economist Justin Wolfers, and The New Republic journalist Nate Cohn. By March, Leonhardt had amassed fifteen employees from within The New York Times; the newsletter's staff included individuals who had created the Times's dialect quiz, fourth down analyzer, and a calculator for determining buying or renting a home. The Upshot debuted in April 2014. Fast Company reviewed an article about Illinois Secure Choice—a state-funded retirement saving system—as "neither a terse news item, nor a formal financial advice column, nor a politically charged response to economic policy", citing its informal and neutral tone. The Upshot developed "the needle" for the 2016 presidential election and 2020 presidential elections, a thermometer dial displaying the probability of a candidate winning. In January 2016, Cox was named editor of The Upshot. Kevin Quealy was named editor in June 2022. The New York Times has said it is perceived as a liberal newspaper. An analysis by Pew Research Center in October 2014 placed the Times readership as ideologically liberal based on a scale of 10 political values questions. According to an internal readership poll conducted by The New York Times in 2019, eighty-four percent of readers identified as liberal. The New York Times has struggled internally with how to balance its coverage, dismissing criticism from the left for "sanewashing" right-wing viewpoints in its coverage of Donald Trump. In covering Israel's war on the Gaza Strip that began in 2023, The New York Times instructed its reporters to restrict use of the terms 'Palestine', 'genocide', and 'refugee camps' to specific usages, with data analysis showing a pattern of articles emphasizing Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians over a much larger number of Palestinian civilians killed by Israelis. The group Writers Against the War on Gaza wrote in the blog Mondoweiss that this has contrasted with The New York Times coverage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in which Russia is considered a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests, while Israel is considered an ally. In February 1942, The New York Times crossword debuted in The New York Times Magazine; according to Richard Shepard, the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 convinced then-publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the necessity of a crossword. The New York Times has published recipes since the 1850s and has had a separate food section since the 1940s. In 1961, restaurant critic Craig Claiborne published The New York Times Cookbook, an unauthorized cookbook that drew from the Times's recipes. Since 2010, former food editor Amanda Hesser has published The Essential New York Times Cookbook, a compendium of recipes from The New York Times. The Innovation Report in 2014 revealed that the Times had attempted to establish a cooking website since 1998, but faced difficulties with the absence of a defined data structure. In September 2014, The New York Times introduced NYT Cooking, an application and website. Edited by food editor Sam Sifton, the Times's cooking website features 21,000 recipes as of 2022. NYT Cooking features videos as part of an effort by Sifton to hire two former Tasty employees from BuzzFeed. In August 2023, NYT Cooking added personalized recommendations through the cosine similarity of text embeddings of recipe titles. The website also features no-recipe recipes, a concept proposed by Sifton. In May 2016, The New York Times Company announced a partnership with startup Chef'd to form a meal delivery service that would deliver ingredients from The New York Times Cooking recipes to subscribers; Chef'd shut down in July 2018 after failing to accrue capital and secure financing. The Hollywood Reporter reported in September 2022 that the Times would expand its delivery options to US$95 cooking kits curated by chefs such as Nina Compton, Chintan Pandya, and Naoko Takei Moore. That month, the staff of NYT Cooking went on tour with Compton, Pandya, and Moore in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York City, culminating in a food festival. In addition, The New York Times offered its own wine club originally operated by the Global Wine Company. The New York Times Wine Club was established in August 2009, during a dramatic decrease in advertising revenue. By 2021, the wine club was managed by Lot18, a company that provides proprietary labels. Lot18 managed the Williams Sonoma Wine Club and its own wine club Tasting Room. The New York Times archives its articles in a basement annex beneath its building known as "the morgue", a venture started by managing editor Carr Van Anda in 1907. The morgue comprises news clippings, a pictures library, and the Times's book and periodicals library. As of 2014, it is the largest library of any media company, dating back to 1851. In November 2018, The New York Times partnered with Google to digitize the Archival Library. Additionally, The New York Times has maintained a virtual microfilm reader known as TimesMachine since 2014. The service launched with archives from 1851 to 1980; in 2016, TimesMachine expanded to include archives from 1981 to 2002. The Times built a pipeline to take in TIFF images, article metadata in XML and an INI file of Cartesian geometry describing the boundaries of the page, and convert it into a PNG of image tiles and JSON containing the information in the XML and INI files. The image tiles are generated using GDAL and displayed using Leaflet, using data from a content delivery network. The Times ran optical character recognition on the articles using Tesseract and shingled and fuzzy string matched the result. The New York Times uses a proprietary content management system known as Scoop for its online content and the Microsoft Word-based content management system CCI for its print content. Scoop was developed in 2008 to serve as a secondary content management system for editors working in CCI to publish their content on the Times's website; as part of The New York Times's online endeavors, editors now write their content in Scoop and send their work to CCI for print publication. Since its introduction, Scoop has superseded several processes within the Times, including print edition planning and collaboration, and features tools such as multimedia integration, notifications, content tagging, and drafts. The New York Times uses private articles for high-profile opinion pieces, such as those written by Russian president Vladimir Putin and actress Angelina Jolie, and for high-level investigations. In January 2012, the Times released Integrated Content Editor (ICE), a revision tracking tool for WordPress and TinyMCE. ICE is integrated within the Times's workflow by providing a unified text editor for print and online editors, reducing the divide between print and online operations. By 2017, The New York Times began developing a new authoring tool to its content management system known as Oak, in an attempt to further the Times's visual efforts in articles and reduce the discrepancy between the mediums in print and online articles. The system reduces the input of editors and supports additional visual mediums in an editor that resembles the appearance of the article. Oak is based on ProseMirror, a JavaScript rich-text editor toolkit, and retains the revision tracking and commenting functionalities of The New York Times's previous systems. Additionally, Oak supports predefined article headers. In 2019, Oak was updated to support collaborative editing using Firebase to update editors's cursor status. Several Google Cloud Functions and Google Cloud Tasks allow articles to be previewed as they will be printed, and the Times's primary MySQL database is regularly updated to update editors on the article status. Style and design Since 1895, The New York Times has maintained a manual of style in several forms. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage was published on the Times's intranet in 1999. The New York Times uses honorifics when referring to individuals. With the AP Stylebook's removal of honorifics in 2000 and The Wall Street Journal's omission of courtesy titles in May 2023, the Times is the only national newspaper that continues to use honorifics. According to former copy editor Merrill Perlman, The New York Times continues to use honorifics as a "sign of civility". The Times's use of courtesy titles led to an apocryphal rumor that the paper had referred to singer Meat Loaf as "Mr. Loaf". Several exceptions have been made; the former sports section and The New York Times Book Review do not use honorifics. A leaked memo following the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 revealed that editors were given a last-minute instruction to omit the honorific from Osama bin Laden's name, consistent with deceased figures of historic significance, such as Adolf Hitler, Napoleon, and Vladimir Lenin. The New York Times uses academic and military titles for individuals prominently serving in that position. In 1986, the Times began to use Ms., and introduced the gender-neutral title Mx. in 2015. The New York Times uses initials when a subject has expressed a preference, such as Donald Trump. The New York Times maintains a strict but not absolute obscenity policy, including phrases. In a review of the Canadian hardcore punk band Fucked Up, music critic Kelefa Sanneh wrote that the band's name—entirely rendered in asterisks—would not be printed in the Times "unless an American president, or someone similar, says it by mistake"; The New York Times did not repeat then-vice president Dick Cheney's use of "fuck" against then-senator Patrick Leahy in 2004 or then-vice president Joe Biden's remarks that the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 was a "big fucking deal". The Times's profanity policy has been tested by former president Donald Trump. The New York Times published Trump's Access Hollywood tape in October 2016, containing the words "fuck", "pussy", "bitch", and "tits", the first time the publication had published an expletive on its front page, and repeated an explicit phrase for fellatio stated by then-White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci in July 2017. The New York Times omitted Trump's use of the phrase "shithole countries" from its headline in favor of "vulgar language" in January 2018. The Times banned certain words, such as "bitch", "whore", and "sluts", from Wordle in 2022. Journalists for The New York Times do not write their own headlines, but rather copy editors who specifically write headlines. The Times's guidelines insist headline editors get to the main point of an article but avoid giving away endings, if present. Other guidelines include using slang "sparingly", avoiding tabloid headlines, not ending a line on a preposition, article, or adjective, and chiefly, not to pun. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage states that wordplay, such as "Rubber Industry Bounces Back", is to be tested on a colleague as a canary is to be tested in a coal mine; "when no song bursts forth, start rewriting". The New York Times has amended headlines due to controversy. In 2019, following two back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, the Times used the headline, "Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism", to describe then-president Donald Trump's words after the shootings. After criticism from FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver, the headline was changed to, "Assailing Hate But Not Guns". Online, The New York Times's headlines do not face the same length restrictions as headlines that appear in print; print headlines must fit within a column, often six words. Additionally, headlines must "break" properly, containing a complete thought on each line without splitting up prepositions and adverbs. Writers may edit a headline to fit an article more aptly if further developments occur. The Times uses A/B testing for articles on the front page, placing two headlines against each other. At the end of the test, the headlines that receives more traffic is chosen. The alteration of a headline regarding intercepted Russian data used in the Mueller special counsel investigation was noted by Trump in a March 2017 interview with Time, in which he claimed that the headline used the word "wiretapped" in the print version of the paper on January 20, while the digital article on January 19 omitted the word. The headline was intentionally changed in the print version to use "wiretapped" in order to fit within the print guidelines. The nameplate of The New York Times has been unaltered since 1967. In creating the initial nameplate, Henry Jarvis Raymond took as his model the British newspaper The Times, which used a Blackletter style called Textura, popularized following the fall of the Western Roman Empire and regional variations of Alcuin's script, as well as a period. With the change to The New-York Times on September 14, 1857, the nameplate followed. Under George Jones, the terminals of the "N", "r", and "s" were intentionally exaggerated into swashes. The nameplate in the January 15, 1894, issue trimmed the terminals once more, smoothed the edges, and turned the stem supporting the "T" into an ornament. The hyphen was dropped on December 1, 1896, after Adolph Ochs purchased the paper. The descender of the "h" was shortened on December 30, 1914. The largest change to the nameplate was introduced on February 21, 1967, when type designer Ed Benguiat redesigned the logo, most prominently turning the arrow ornament into a diamond. Notoriously, the new logo dropped the period that had followed the word Times up until that point; one reader compared the omission of the period to "performing plastic surgery on Helen of Troy." Picture editor John Radosta worked with a New York University professor to determine that dropping the period saved the paper US$41.28 (equivalent to $398.59 in 2025). Print edition As of December 2023, The New York Times has printed sixty thousand issues, a statistic represented in the paper's masthead to the right of the volume number, the Times's years in publication written in Roman numerals. The volume and issues are separated by four dots representing the edition number of that issue; on the day of the 2000 presidential election, the Times was revised four separate times, necessitating the use of an em dash in place of an ellipsis. The em dash issue was printed hundreds times over before being replaced by the one-dot issue. Despite efforts by newsroom employees to recycle copies sent to The New York Times's office, several copies were kept, including one put on display at the Museum at The Times. From February 7, 1898, to December 31, 1999, the Times's issue number was incorrect by five hundred issues, an error suspected by The Atlantic to be the result of a careless front page type editor. The misreporting was noticed by news editor Aaron Donovan, who was calculating the number of issues in a spreadsheet and noticed the discrepancy. The New York Times celebrated fifty thousand issues on March 14, 1995, an observance that should have occurred on July 26, 1996. The New York Times has reduced the physical size of its print edition while retaining its broadsheet format. The New-York Daily Times debuted at 18 inches (460 mm) across. By the 1950s, the Times was being printed at 16 inches (410 mm) across. In 1953, an increase in paper costs to US$10 (equivalent to $120.34 in 2025) a ton increased newsprint costs to US$21.7 million (equivalent to $326,110,074.63 in 2025) On December 28, 1953, the pages were reduced to 15.5 inches (390 mm). On February 14, 1955, a further reduction to 15 inches (380 mm) occurred, followed by 14.5 and 13.5 inches (370 and 340 mm). On August 6, 2007, the largest cut occurred when the pages were reduced to 12 inches (300 mm),[k] a decision that other broadsheets had previously considered. Then-executive editor Bill Keller stated that a narrower paper would be more beneficial to the reader but acknowledged a net loss in article space of five percent. In 1985, The New York Times Company established a minority stake in a US$21.7 million (equivalent to $326,110,074.63 in 2025) newsprint plant in Clermont, Quebec through Donahue Malbaie. The company sold its equity interest in Donahue Malbaie in 2017. The New York Times often uses large, bolded headlines for major events. For the print version of the Times, these headlines are written by one copy editor, reviewed by two other copy editors, approved by the masthead editors, and polished by other print editors. The process is completed before 8 p.m., but it may be repeated if further development occur, as did take place during the 2020 presidential election. On the day Joe Biden was declared the winner, The New York Times utilized a "hammer headline" reading, "Biden Beats Trump", in all caps and bolded. A dozen journalists discussed several potential headlines, such as "It's Biden" or "Biden's Moment", and prepared for a Donald Trump victory, in which they would use "Trump Prevails". During Trump's first impeachment, the Times drafted the hammer headline, "Trump Impeached". The New York Times altered the ligatures between the E and the A, as not doing so would leave a noticeable gap due to the stem of the A sloping away from the E. The Times reused the tight kerning for "Biden Beats Trump" and Trump's second impeachment, which simply read, "Impeached". In cases where two major events occur on the same day or immediately after each other, The New York Times has used a "paddle wheel" headline, where both headlines are used but split by a line. The term dates back to August 8, 1959, when it was revealed that the United States was monitoring Soviet missile firings and when Explorer 6—shaped like a paddle wheel—launched. Since then, the paddle wheel has been used several times, including on January 21, 1981, when Ronald Reagan was sworn in minutes before Iran released fifty-two American hostages, ending the Iran hostage crisis. At the time, most newspapers favored the end of the hostage crisis, but the Times placed the inauguration above the crisis. Other occasions in which the paddle wheel has been used include on July 26, 2000, when the 2000 Camp David Summit ended without an agreement and when Bush announced that Dick Cheney would be his running mate, and on June 24, 2016, when the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum passed, beginning Brexit, and when the Supreme Court deadlocked in United States v. Texas. The New York Times has run editorials from its editorial board on the front page twice. On June 13, 1920, the Times ran an editorial opposing Warren G. Harding, who was nominated during that year's Republican Party presidential primaries. Amid growing acceptance to run editorials on the front pages from publications such as the Detroit Free Press, The Patriot-News, The Arizona Republic, and The Indianapolis Star, The New York Times ran an editorial on its front page on December 5, 2015, following a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, in which fourteen people were killed. The editorial advocates for the prohibition of "slightly modified combat rifles" used in the San Bernardino shooting and "certain kinds of ammunition". Conservative figures, including Texas senator Ted Cruz, The Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, Fox & Friends co-anchor Steve Doocy, and then-New Jersey governor Chris Christie criticized the Times. Talk radio host Erick Erickson acquired an issue of The New York Times to fire several rounds into the paper, posting a picture online. Since 1997, The New York Times's primary distribution center is located in College Point, Queens. The facility is 300,000 ft2 (28,000 m2) and employs 170 people as of 2017. The College Point distribution center prints 300,000 to 800,000 newspapers daily. On most occasions, presses start before 11 p.m. and finish before 3 a.m. A robotic crane grabs a roll of newsprint and several rollers ensure ink can be printed on paper. The final newspapers are wrapped in plastic and shipped out. As of 2018, the College Point facility accounted for 41 percent of production. Other copies are printed at 26 other publications, such as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Dallas Morning News, The Santa Fe New Mexican, and the Courier Journal. With the decline of newspapers, particularly regional publications, the Times must travel further; for example, newspapers for Hawaii are flown from San Francisco on United Airlines, and Sunday papers are flown from Los Angeles on Hawaiian Airlines. Computer glitches, mechanical issues, and weather phenomena affect circulation but do not stop the paper from reaching customers. The College Point facility prints over two dozen other papers, including The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. The New York Times has halted its printing process several times to account for major developments. The first printing stoppage occurred on March 31, 1968, when then-president Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not seek a second term. Other press stoppages include May 19, 1994, for the death of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and July 17, 1996, for Trans World Airlines Flight 800. The 2000 presidential election necessitated two press stoppages. Al Gore appeared to concede on November 8, forcing then-executive editor Joseph Lelyveld to stop the Times's presses to print a new headline, "Bush Appears to Defeat Gore", with a story that stated George W. Bush was elected president. However, Gore held off his concession speech over doubts over Florida. Lelyveld reran the headline, "Bush and Gore Vie for an Edge". Since 2000, three printing stoppages have been issued for the death of William Rehnquist on September 3, 2005, for the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011, and for the passage of the Marriage Equality Act in the New York State Assembly and subsequent signage by then-governor Andrew Cuomo on June 24, 2011. Online platforms The New York Times website is hosted at nytimes.com. It has undergone several major redesigns and infrastructure developments since its debut. In April 2006, The New York Times redesigned its website with an emphasis on multimedia. In preparation for Super Tuesday in February 2008, the Times developed a live election system using the Associated Press's File Transfer Protocol (FTP) service and a Ruby on Rails application; nytimes.com experienced its largest traffic on Super Tuesday and the day after. The NYTimes application debuted with the introduction of the App Store on July 10, 2008. Engadget's Scott McNulty wrote critically of the app, negatively comparing it to The New York Times's mobile website. An iPad version with select articles was released on April 3, 2010, with the release of the first-generation iPad. In October, The New York Times expanded NYT Editors' Choice to include the paper's full articles. NYT for iPad was free until 2011. The Times applications on iPhone and iPad began offering in-app subscriptions in July 2011. The Times released a web application for iPad—featuring a format summarizing trending headlines on Twitter—and a Windows 8 application in October 2012. Efforts to ensure profitability through an online magazine and a "Need to Know" subscription emerged in Adweek in July 2013. In March 2014, The New York Times announced three applications—NYT Now, an application that offers pertinent news in a blog format, and two unnamed applications, later known as NYT Opinion and NYT Cooking—to diversify its product laterals. The Daily is the modern front page of The New York Times. The New York Times manages several podcasts, including multiple podcasts with Serial Productions. The Times's longest-running podcast is The Book Review Podcast, debuting as Inside The New York Times Book Review in April 2006. The New York Times's defining podcast is The Daily, a daily news podcast hosted by Michael Barbaro which debuted on February 1, 2017. Between March 2022 and March 2025, the approximately 30 minute programme was co-hosted with Sabrina Tavernise. Beginning in April 2025 Barbaro was joined by two new regular co-hosts, Natalie Kitroeff and Rachel Abrams. The Interview was launched in 2024 and is hosted weekly by David Marchese and Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Episodes typically last 40 to 50 minutes. Condensed versions of the interviews are published simultaneously in The New York Times Magazine. Guests have included politicians, actors, influential experts, media figures and high-profile writers. In October 2021, The New York Times began testing "New York Times Audio", an application featuring podcasts from the Times, audio versions of articles—including from other publications through Audm, and archives from This American Life. The application debuted in May 2023 exclusively on iOS for Times subscribers. New York Times Audio includes exclusive podcasts such as The Headlines, a daily news recap, and Shorts, short audio stories under ten minutes. In addition, a "Reporter Reads" section features Times journalists reading their articles and providing commentary. The New York Times has used video games as part of its journalistic efforts, among the first publications to do so, contributing to an increase in Internet traffic; the publication has also developed its own video games. In 2014, The New York Times Magazine introduced Spelling Bee, a word game in which players guess words from a set of letters in a honeycomb and are awarded points for the length of the word and receive extra points if the word is a pangram. The game was proposed by Will Shortz, created by Frank Longo, and has been maintained by Sam Ezersky. In May 2018, Spelling Bee was published on nytimes.com, furthering its popularity. In February 2019, the Times introduced Letter Boxed, in which players form words from letters placed on the edges of a square box, followed in June 2019 by Tiles, a matching game in which players form sequences of tile pairings, and Vertex, in which players connect vertices to assemble an image. In July 2023, The New York Times introduced Connections, in which players identify groups of words that are connected by a common property. In April, the Times introduced Digits, a game that required using operations on different values to reach a set number; Digits was shut down in August. In March 2024, The New York Times released Strands, a themed word search. In January 2022, The New York Times Company acquired Wordle, a word game developed by Josh Wardle in 2021, at a valuation in the "low-seven figures". The acquisition was proposed by David Perpich, a member of the Sulzberger family who proposed the purchase to Knight over Slack after reading about the game. The Washington Post purportedly considered acquiring Wordle, according to Vanity Fair. At the 2022 Game Developers Conference, Wardle stated that he was overwhelmed by the volume of Wordle facsimiles and overzealous monetization practices in other games. Concerns over The New York Times monetizing Wordle by implementing a paywall mounted; Wordle is a client-side browser game and can be played offline by downloading its webpage. Wordle moved to the Times's servers and website in February. The game was added to the NYT Games application in August, necessitating it be rewritten in the JavaScript library React. In November, The New York Times announced that Tracy Bennett would be the Wordle's editor. Other publications The New York Times Magazine and The Boston Globe Magazine are the only weekly Sunday magazines following The Washington Post Magazine's cancellation in December 2022. In February 2016, The New York Times introduced a Spanish website, The New York Times en Español. The website, intended to be read on mobile devices, would contain translated articles from the Times and reporting from journalists based in Mexico City. The Times en Español's style editor is Paulina Chavira, who has advocated for pluralistic Spanish to accommodate the variety of nationalities in the newsroom's journalists and wrote a stylebook for The New York Times en Español. Articles the Times intends to publish in Spanish are sent to a translation agency and adapted for Spanish writing conventions; the present progressive tense may be used for forthcoming events in English, but other tenses are preferable in Spanish. The Times en Español consults the Real Academia Española and Fundéu and frequently modifies the use of diacritics—such as using an acute accent for the Cártel de Sinaloa but not the Cartel de Medellín—and using the gender-neutral pronoun elle. Headlines in The New York Times en Español are not capitalized. The Times en Español publishes El Times, a newsletter led by Elda Cantú intended for all Spanish speakers. In September 2019, The New York Times ended The New York Times en Español's separate operations. A study published in The Translator in 2023 found that the Times en Español engaged in tabloidization. In June 2012, The New York Times introduced a Chinese website, 纽约时报中文, in response to Chinese editions created by The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Conscious to censorship, the Times established servers outside of China and affirmed that the website would uphold the paper's journalistic standards; the government of China had previously blocked articles from nytimes.com through the Great Firewall, and the website was blocked in China until August 2001 after then-general secretary Jiang Zemin met with journalists from The New York Times. Then-foreign editor Joseph Kahn assisted in the establishment of cn.nytimes.com, an effort that contributed to his appointment as executive editor in April 2022. In October 2012, 纽约时报中文 published an article detailing the wealth of then-premier Wen Jiabao's family. In response, the government of China blocked access to nytimes.com and cn.nytimes.com and references to the Times and Wen were censored on microblogging service Sina Weibo. In March 2015, a mirror of 纽约时报中文 and the website for GreatFire were the targets for a government-sanctioned distributed denial of service attack on GitHub in March 2015, disabling access to the service for several days. Chinese authorities requested the removal of The New York Times's news applications from the App Store in December 2016. Awards and recognition As of 2023, The New York Times has received 137 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any publication. The New York Times is considered a newspaper of record in the United States.[l] The Times is the largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States; as of 2022, The New York Times is the second-largest newspaper by print circulation in the United States behind The Wall Street Journal. A study published in Science, Technology, & Human Values in 2013 found that The New York Times received more citations in academic journals than the American Sociological Review, Research Policy, or the Harvard Law Review. With sixteen million unique records, the Times is the third-most referenced source in Common Crawl, a collection of online material used in datasets such as GPT-3, behind Wikipedia and a United States patent database. The New Yorker's Max Norman wrote in March 2023 that the Times has shaped mainstream English usage. In a January 2018 article for The Washington Post, Margaret Sullivan stated that The New York Times affects the "whole media and political ecosystem". The New York Times's nascent success has led to concerns over media consolidation, particularly amid the decline of newspapers. In 2006, economists Lisa George and Joel Waldfogel examined the consequences of the Times's national distribution strategy and audience with circulation of local newspapers, finding that local circulation decreased among college-educated readers. The effect of The New York Times in this manner was observed in The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, the newspaper of record for Fargo, North Dakota. Axios founder Jim VandeHei opined that the Times is "going to basically be a monopoly" in an opinion piece written by then-media columnist and former BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief Ben Smith; in the article, Smith cites the strength of The New York Times's journalistic workforce, broadening content, and the expropriation of Gawker editor-in-chief Choire Sicha, Recode editor-in-chief Kara Swisher, and Quartz editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney. Smith compared the Times to the New York Yankees during their 1927 season containing Murderers' Row. Controversies Since 2003, studies analyzing coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the New York Times have demonstrated a bias against Palestinians and in favor of Israel.[m] The New York Times has received criticism for its coverage of the Gaza war and genocide. In April 2024, The Intercept reported that a November 2023 internal memorandum by Susan Wessling and Philip Pan instructed journalists to reduce using the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" and to avoid using the phrase "occupied territory" in the context of Palestinian land, "Palestine" except in rare circumstances, and the term "refugee camps" to describe areas of Gaza despite recognition from the United Nations. A spokesperson from the Times stated that issuing guidance was standard practice. An analysis by The Intercept noted that The New York Times described Israeli deaths as a massacre nearly sixty times, but had only described Palestinian deaths as a massacre once. Writers and editors have left the newspaper due to its coverage of events in Gaza, including Jazmine Hughes and Jamie Lauren Keiles. In December 2023, The New York Times published an investigation titled "'Screams Without Words': How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7", alleging that Hamas weaponized sexual and gender-based violence during its armed incursion on Israel. The investigation was the subject of an article from The Intercept questioning the journalistic acumen of Anat Schwartz, a filmmaker involved in the inquiry who had no prior reporting experience and agreed with a post stating Israel should "violate any norm, on the way to victory", doubting the veracity of the opening claim that Gal Abdush was raped in a timespan disputed by her family, and alleging that the Times was pressured by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. The New York Times initiated an inquiry into the leaking of confidential information about the report to other outlets, which received criticism from NewsGuild of New York president Susan DeCarava for purported racial targeting; the Times's investigation was inconclusive, but found gaps in the way proprietary journalistic material is handled. The New York Times Building has been a site of protest action during the Gaza war and genocide, including a November 2023 sit-in demanding that The Times's editorial board publicly call for a ceasefire and accusing the media company of "complicity in laundering genocide", a February 29, 2024, protest and press conference following the release of The Intercept's critical investigation into the NYT "Screams Without Words" exposé, and an action on July 30, 2025, in which protesters spray-painted "NYT Lies, Gaza dies" on the building's glass facade. In addition, protesters blocked The New York Times's distribution center March 14, 2024 and executive editor Joseph Kahn's residence was splattered with red paint on August 25, 2025. The collective Writers Against the War on Gaza, which publishes the mock publication The New York War Crimes, has been associated with protests against The New York Times. On October 27, 2025, 300 writers—including scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals—pledged to boycott The New York Times and withhold contributions to the paper in protest of what they describe as its complicity in the Gaza genocide, demanding 1) a review of anti-Palestinian bias in the newsroom, 2) a retraction of "Screams Without Words", and 3) a call from the editorial board for a US arms embargo on Israel. Among the initial signatories, about 150 had previously contributed to the Times. The New York Times has received criticism regarding its coverage of transgender people. When it published an opinion piece by Weill Cornell Medicine professor Richard A. Friedman called "How Changeable Is Gender?" in August 2015, Vox's German Lopez criticized Friedman as suggesting that parents and doctors might be right in letting children suffer from severe dysphoria in case something changes down the line, and as implying that conversion therapy may work for transgender children. In February 2023, nearly one thousand current and former Times writers and contributors wrote an open letter addressed to standards editor Philip B. Corbett, criticizing the paper's coverage of transgender, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people; some of the Times's articles have been cited in state legislatures attempting to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care. Contributors wrote in the open letter that "the Times has in recent years treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources."[n] According to former Times journalist Billie Jean Sweeney, a push for writers to challenge “every aspect of being trans”, ranging from gender-inclusive language to access to medical care, came from the top in 2022 after leadership was handed over to A. G. Sulzberger, Joe Kahn, and Carolyn Ryan; as part of an effort to win good will with the Trump campaign without incurring backlash from the general populace. The Times has continually denied any bias in its reporting, insisting that its coverage of “fiercely contested medical and legal debates” is fair and balanced, and that it would not tolerate journalists protesting its transgender coverage. Notes References Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turan] | [TOKENS: 2992] |
Contents Turan Turan (Avestan: 𐬚𐬏𐬌𐬭𐬌𐬌𐬁𐬥𐬆𐬨, romanized: θūiriiānəm; Middle Persian: Tūrān; Persian: توران, romanized: Turân, pronounced [tʰuːˈɾɒːn], lit. 'The Land of Tur') is a historical region in Central Asia. The term is of Iranian origin and may refer to a particular prehistoric human settlement, a historic geographical region, or a culture. The original Turanians were an Iranian tribe of the Avestan age. Overview In ancient Iranian mythology, Tūr or Turaj (Tuzh in Middle Persian)[better source needed] is the son of the emperor Fereydun. According to the account in the Shahnameh, the nomadic tribes who inhabited these lands were ruled by Tūr. In that sense, the Turanians could be members of two Iranian peoples both descending from Fereydun, but with different geographical domains and often at war with each other. Turan, therefore, comprised five areas: the Kopet Dag region, the Atrek valley, parts of Bactria, Sogdia and Margiana. A later association of the original Turanians with Turkic peoples is based primarily on the subsequent Turkification of Central Asia, including the above areas. According to C. E. Bosworth, however, there was no cultural relationship between the ancient Turkic cultures and the Turanians of the Shahnameh. History The oldest existing mention of Turan is in the Farvardin yashts, which are in the Young Avestan language and have been dated by linguists to about 2500 years ago. According to Gherardo Gnoli, the Avesta contains the names of various tribes who lived in proximity to each other: "the Airyas [Aryans], Tuiryas [Turanians], Sairimas [Sarmatians], Sainus [Sacae] and Dahis [Dahae]". In the hymns of the Avesta, the adjective Tūrya is attached to various enemies of Zoroastrism like Fraŋrasyan (Shahnameh: Afrāsīāb). The word occurs only once in the Gathas, but 20 times in the later parts of the Avesta. The Tuiryas, as they were called in Avesta, play a more important role in the Avesta than the Sairimas, Sainus and Dahis. Zoroaster himself hailed from the Airya people but he also preached his message to other neighboring tribes. According to Mary Boyce, in the Farvardin Yasht, "In it (verses 143–144) are praised the fravashis of righteous men and women not only among the Aryas (as the "Avestan" people called themselves), but also among the Turiyas, Sairimas, Sainus and Dahis; and the personal names, like those of the people, all seem Iranian in character". Hostility between Tuirya and Airya is indicated also in the Farvardtn Yast (vv. 37-8), where the Fravashis of the Just are said to have provided support in battle against the Danus, who appear to be a clan of the Tura people. Thus in the Avesta, some of the Tuiryas believed in the message of Zoroaster while others rejected the religion. Similar to the ancient homeland of Zoroaster, the precise geography and location of Turan is unknown. In post-Avestan traditions they were thought to inhabit the region north of the Oxus, the river separating them from the Iranians. Their presence, accompanied by incessant wars with the Iranians, helped to define the latter as a distinct nation, proud of their land and ready to spill their blood in its defense. The common names of Turanians in Avesta and Shahnameh include Frarasyan, Aghraethra, Biderafsh, Arjaspa Namkhwast. The names of Iranian tribes including those of the Turanians that appear in Avesta have been studied by Manfred Mayrhofer in his comprehensive book on Avesta personal name etymologies. From the 5th century CE, the Sasanian Empire defined "Turan" in opposition to "Iran", as the land where lay its enemies to the northeast. The continuation of nomadic invasions on the north-eastern borders in historical times kept the memory of the Turanians alive. After the 6th century the Turks, who had been pushed westward by other tribes, became neighbours of Iran and were identified with the Turanians. The identification of the Turanians with the Turks was a late development, possibly made in the early 7th century; the Turks first came into contact with the Iranians only in the 6th century. According to Clifford E. Bosworth: In early Islamic times Persians tended to identify all the lands to the northeast of Khorasan and lying beyond the Oxus with the region of Turan, which in the Shahnama of Ferdowsi is regarded as the land allotted to Fereydun's son Tur. The denizens of Turan were held to include the Turks, in the first four centuries of Islam essentially those nomadizing beyond the Jaxartes, and behind them the Chinese (see Kowalski; Minorsky, "Turan"). Turan thus became both an ethnic and a geographical term, but always containing ambiguities and contradictions, arising from the fact that all through Islamic times the lands immediately beyond the Oxus and along its lower reaches were the homes not of Turks but of Iranian peoples, such as the Sogdians and Khwarezmians. The terms Turk and Turanian became used interchangeably during the Islamic era. The Shahnameh, or the Book of Kings, the compilation of Iranian mythical heritage, uses the two terms equivalently. Other authors, including Tabari, Hakim Iranshah and many other texts follow like. A notable exception is the Abl-Hasan Ali ibn Masudi, an Arab historian who writes: "The birth of Afrasiyab was in the land of Turks and the error that historians and non-historians have made about him being a Turk is due to this reason". By the 10th century, the myth of Afrasiyab was adopted by the Qarakhanid dynasty. During the Safavid era, following the common geographical convention of the Shahnameh, the term Turan was used to refer to the domain of the Uzbek empire in conflict with the Safavids.[citation needed] Some linguists derive the word from the Indo-Iranian root *tura- 'strong, quick, sword', Pashto turan (thuran) 'swordsman'. Others link it to old Iranian *tor 'dark, black', related to the New Persian tār(ik), Pashto tor (thor), and possibly English dark. In this case, it is a reference to the "dark civilization" of Central Asian nomads in contrast to the "illuminated" Zoroastrian civilization of the settled Ārya.[citation needed] In the Persian epic Shahnameh, the term Tūrān ('land of the Tūrya' like Ērān, Īrān = 'land of the Ārya') refers to the inhabitants of the eastern-Iranian border and beyond the Oxus. According to the foundation myth given in the Shahnameh, King Firēdūn (= Avestan Θraētaona) had three sons, Salm, Tūr and Iraj, among whom he divided the world: Asia Minor was given to Salm, Turan to Tur and Iran to Īraj. The older brothers killed the younger, but he was avenged by his grandson, and the Iranians became the rulers of the world. However, the war continued for generations. In the Shahnameh, the word Turan appears nearly 150 times and that of Iran nearly 750 times. Some examples from the Shahnameh: نه خاکست پیدا نه دریا نه کوه ز بس تیغداران توران گروه No earth is visible, no sea, no mountain, From the many blade-wielders of the Turan horde تهمتن به توران سپه شد به جنگ بدانسان که نخجیر بیند پلنگ Tahamtan (Powerful-Bodied) Rostam took the fight to the Turan army Just as a leopard sights its prey. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Western languages borrowed the word Turan as a general designation for modern Central Asia, although this expression has now fallen into disuse. Turan appears next to Iran on numerous maps of the 19th century to designate a region encompassing modern Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and northern parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. This area roughly corresponds to what is called Central Asia today. The phrase Turan Plain or Turan Depression became a geographical term referring to a part of Central Asia. The term Turanian, now obsolete, formerly[when?] occurred in the classifications used by European (especially German, Hungarian, and Slovak) ethnologists, linguists, and Romantics to designate populations speaking non-Indo-European, non-Semitic, and non-Hamitic languages and specially speakers of Altaic, Dravidian, Uralic, Japanese, Korean and other languages. Max Müller (1823–1900) identified different sub-branches within the Turanian language family: Müller also began to muse whether Chinese belonged to the Northern branch or Southern branch. The main relationships between Dravidian, Uralic, and Altaic languages were considered typological. According to Crystal & Robins, "Language families, as conceived in the historical study of languages, should not be confused with the quite separate classifications of languages by reference to their sharing certain predominant features of grammatical structure." As of 2013[update] linguists classify languages according to the method of comparative linguistics rather than using their typological features. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, Max's Müller's "efforts were most successful in the case of the Semites, whose affinities are easy to demonstrate, and probably least successful in the case of the Turanian peoples, whose early origins are hypothetical". As of 2014[update] the scholarly community no longer uses the word Turanian to denote a classification of language families. The relationship between Uralic and Altaic, whose speakers were also designated as Turanian people in 19th-century European literature, remains uncertain. In European discourse, the words Turan and Turanian can designate a certain mentality, i.e. the nomadic in contrast to the urbanized agricultural civilizations. This usage probably[original research?] matches the Zoroastrian concept of the Tūrya, which is not primarily a linguistic or ethnic designation, but rather a name of the infidels who opposed the civilization based on the preaching of Zoroaster. Combined with physical anthropology, the concept of the Turanian mentality has a clear potential for cultural polemic. Thus in 1838 the scholar J.W. Jackson described the Turanid or Turanian race in the following words: The Turanian is the impersonation of material power. He is the merely muscular man at his maximum of collective development. He is not inherently a savage, but he is radically a barbarian. He does not live from hand to mouth, like a beast, but neither has he in full measure the moral and intellectual endowments of the true man. He can labour and he can accumulate, but he cannot think and aspire like a Caucasian. Of the two grand elements of superior human life, he is more deficient in the sentiments than in the faculties. And of the latter, he is better provided with those that conduce to the acquisition of knowledge than the origination of ideas. Polish philosopher Feliks Koneczny claimed the existence of a distinctive Turanian civilization, encompassing both Turkic and some Slavs, such as Russians. This alleged civilization's hallmark would be militarism, anti-intellectualism and an absolute obedience to the ruler. Koneczny saw this civilization as inherently inferior to Latin (Western European) civilization.[citation needed] In the declining days of the Ottoman Empire, some Turkish nationalists adopted the word Turanian to express a pan-Turkic ideology, also called Turanism. As of 2013[update] Turanism forms an important aspect of the ideology of the Turkish Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), whose members are also known as Grey Wolves. In recent times[when?], the word Turanian has sometimes expressed a pan-Altaic nationalism (theoretically including Manchus and Mongols in addition to Turks), though no political organization seems to have adopted such an ambitious platform. Turandot – or Turandokht – is a female name in Iran and it means "Turan's Daughter" in Persian (it is best known in the West through Puccini's famous opera Turandot (1921–24)). Turan is also a common name in the Middle East, and as family surnames in some countries including Bahrain, Iran and Turkey. The Ayyubid ruler Saladin had an older brother with the name Turan-Shah. Turaj, whom ancient Iranian myths depict as the ancestor of the Turanians, is also a popular name and means Son of Darkness. The name Turan according to Iranian myths derives from the homeland of Turaj. The Pahlavi pronunciation of Turaj is Tuzh, according to the Dehkhoda dictionary. Similarly, Iraj, which is also a popular name, is the brother of Turaj in the Shahnameh. An altered version of Turaj is Zaraj, which means son of gold. See also References Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098245] | [TOKENS: 345] |
I never understand why people supply too much info about themselves for small gains.People at LinkedIn wants you to believe that your career is safe if you play by their games, but ironically they are one of the main reasons why companies nowadays are comfortable with hiring and firing fast. People at LinkedIn wants you to believe that your career is safe if you play by their games, but ironically they are one of the main reasons why companies nowadays are comfortable with hiring and firing fast. reply - that I just have "work email verified" and that there is a Persona thing I was not even aware of- a post by Brian Krebs at the top of my feed, exactly on that topic: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bkrebs_if-you-are-thinking-ab... - a post by Brian Krebs at the top of my feed, exactly on that topic: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bkrebs_if-you-are-thinking-ab... reply Do we know how they get that? Because my fingerprints are also in there, so... reply reply I was under the impression they just make database products. Do they have a side hustle involving collecting this type of data? reply It can be some more nefarious use, but it can also just be that they (persona in this case) use their services to process/store your data. reply reply Did you actually follow through with 1-4 and if so what was the outcome? how long did it take? reply reply reply reply reply What this user missed is the affidavit option: you can get a piece of paper attested by a local authority and upload that instead, if you really really need a LinkedIn verified account.Microsoft can go jump. Microsoft can go jump. reply reply reply |
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[SOURCE: https://www.mako.co.il/entertainment-feed/2026-m02_w03/shorts-b40135106bc7c91026.htm] | [TOKENS: 344] |
ריקי מרטין נכנס לבר במיאמי. רואה שלט שריקי מרטין ברשימה של מי ששותה חינם. ריקי מרטין שותהריקי מרטין נכנס לבר במיאמי. רואה שלט שריקי מרטין ברשימה של מי ששותה חינם. ריקי מרטין שותה20.02.2026 ריקי מרטין נכנס לבר במיאמי. רואה שלט שריקי מרטין ברשימה של מי ששותה חינם. ריקי מרטין שותה ריקי מרטין נכנס לבר במיאמי. רואה שלט שריקי מרטין ברשימה של מי ששותה חינם. ריקי מרטין שותה |
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[SOURCE: https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/881030/turtle-beach-stealth-pivot-controller-lego-mario-yoshi-deal-sale] | [TOKENS: 2036] |
GadgetsCloseGadgetsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All GadgetsGamingCloseGamingPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All GamingPC GamingClosePC GamingPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All PC GamingTurtle Beach’s new PC controller with swiveling sticks is 30 percent offThere are also ways to save on Lego’s mechanized Mario set and Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds.There are also ways to save on Lego’s mechanized Mario set and Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds.by Brandon WidderCloseBrandon WidderSenior Editor, E-CommercePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Brandon WidderFeb 19, 2026, 4:42 PM UTCLinkShareIf you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.Image: The VergeBrandon WidderCloseBrandon WidderPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Brandon Widder is a senior editor overseeing deals, gift guides, and commerce. He spent six years spearheading buying guides and consumer tech coverage at Digital Trends.Many modern gamepads have adopted a modular design in recent years, from the Victrix Pro BFG Reloaded to Hyperkin’s clamp-on X5 Alteron for the Nintendo Switch. However, few of them are quite as innovative as last year’s Turtle Beach Stealth Pivot, which is now on sale at Amazon and Best Buy for an all-time low of $99.99 ($40 off).Turtle Beach Stealth Pivot$100$14029% off$100$100 at Amazon$100 at Best Buy$140 at Turtle BeachThe defining feature of the Stealth Pivot doesn’t lie with its drift-free Hall effects sticks or its built-in social notifications — though, those are nice additions. The controller’s main selling factor is a pair of rotating modules, which, when depressed and swiveled, turn an otherwise traditional button and thumbstick layout into one better fit for tackling retro titles and fighting games. You also get a set of programmable back buttons, adjustable trigger stops for a more customized feel, a 3.5mm jack, and the ability to save up to five distinct profiles on the fly.RelatedThe best Xbox controller to buy right nowThe Pocket Taco is the best way to turn your phone into a Game BoyGoogle Pixel 10A preorders come with a $100 gift cardAs for compatibility, the Stealth Pivot works wirelessly with PC using the included 2.4GHz wireless transmitter, or via Bluetooth, which also lets you connect it to mobile devices and select smart TVs. Battery life is limited to about 20 hours per charge, though you can also use it with Xbox consoles via a wired connection, making it even more versatile.More ways to save todayLego’s Mario and Yoshi set is currently on sale at Amazon and Target for a $103.99 ($26 off), matching its best price to date. The 15-inch, 1,215-piece kit looks to be a pretty faithful recreation of the 16-bit sprites used in Super Mario World, which, with the help of a hand crank, move to replicate Yoshi’s original running animation. It’s pretty clever, even if the 2D creation will spend most of the time on your shelf with its various mechanisms hidden from view.Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds, which are a somewhat hard sell at $299, are a lot more appealing now that they’re on sale at Amazon and Best Buy for an all-time low of $199.99. The unique open-style earbuds leverage the company’s OpenAudio technology to direct sound toward your ears while keeping your canals unobstructed, allowing them to deftly blend music with your daily life. They’re extremely comfortable and easy to control, too, though the trade-off for total awareness means you’re going to be giving up some of that low-end oomph in the process. Read our review.If you’re a Pixel phone owner who prioritizes their phone above all else, Google’s Pixel Flex Fast Charger is now available from Amazon and Verizon for $35.99 ($24 off), its lowest price to date. The 67W wall charger is outfitted with two USB-C ports; however, unlike rival chargers, Google’s first-party oblong offering can prioritize Pixel phones when charging two devices simultaneously, ensuring your phone is topped off before other electronics.Verge DealsSign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox weekly.Email (required)Sign UpBy submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Brandon WidderCloseBrandon WidderSenior Editor, E-CommercePosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Brandon WidderDealsCloseDealsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All DealsGadgetsCloseGadgetsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All GadgetsGamingCloseGamingPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All GamingPC GamingClosePC GamingPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All PC GamingVerge ShoppingCloseVerge ShoppingPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Verge ShoppingMost PopularMost PopularThe RAM shortage is coming for everything you care aboutA $10K+ bounty is waiting for anyone who can unplug Ring doorbells from Amazon’s cloudXbox chief Phil Spencer is leaving MicrosoftRead new Microsoft gaming CEO Asha Sharma’s memo on the future of XboxMeta’s VR metaverse is ditching VRVerge DealsSign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox weekly.Email (required)Sign UpBy submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Advertiser Content FromThis is the title for the native ad Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gadgets Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All PC Gaming Turtle Beach’s new PC controller with swiveling sticks is 30 percent off There are also ways to save on Lego’s mechanized Mario set and Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds. There are also ways to save on Lego’s mechanized Mario set and Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Brandon Widder If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Brandon Widder Many modern gamepads have adopted a modular design in recent years, from the Victrix Pro BFG Reloaded to Hyperkin’s clamp-on X5 Alteron for the Nintendo Switch. However, few of them are quite as innovative as last year’s Turtle Beach Stealth Pivot, which is now on sale at Amazon and Best Buy for an all-time low of $99.99 ($40 off). The defining feature of the Stealth Pivot doesn’t lie with its drift-free Hall effects sticks or its built-in social notifications — though, those are nice additions. The controller’s main selling factor is a pair of rotating modules, which, when depressed and swiveled, turn an otherwise traditional button and thumbstick layout into one better fit for tackling retro titles and fighting games. You also get a set of programmable back buttons, adjustable trigger stops for a more customized feel, a 3.5mm jack, and the ability to save up to five distinct profiles on the fly. As for compatibility, the Stealth Pivot works wirelessly with PC using the included 2.4GHz wireless transmitter, or via Bluetooth, which also lets you connect it to mobile devices and select smart TVs. Battery life is limited to about 20 hours per charge, though you can also use it with Xbox consoles via a wired connection, making it even more versatile. More ways to save today Verge Deals Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox weekly. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Brandon Widder Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Deals Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gadgets Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All PC Gaming Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Verge Shopping Most Popular Verge Deals Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox weekly. This is the title for the native ad More in Gadgets This is the title for the native ad Top Stories © 2026 Vox Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Khorasan] | [TOKENS: 4352] |
Contents Khorasan Khorasan[a] is a historical eastern region in the Iranian Plateau in West and Central Asia that encompasses western and northern Afghanistan, northeastern Iran, the eastern halves of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, western Tajikistan, and portions of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The extent of the region referred to as Khorasan varied over time. In its stricter historical sense, it comprised the present territories of northeastern Iran, parts of Afghanistan and southern parts of Central Asia, extending as far as the Amu Darya (Oxus) river. However, the name has often been used in a loose sense to include a wider region that included most of Transoxiana (encompassing Bukhara and Samarqand in present-day Uzbekistan), extended westward to the Caspian coast and to the Dasht-e Kavir southward to Sistan, and eastward to the Pamir Mountains. Greater Khorasan is today sometimes used to distinguish the larger historical region from the former Khorasan Province of Iran (1906–2004), which roughly encompassed the western portion of the historical Greater Khorasan. In recent scholarship, Greater Khorasan refers to an extensive interaction sphere in Central Asia during the Middle and Late Bronze Age. The emergence of complex societies during this period is observed especially during 2400–1500 BCE in southern Central Asia. Thus, the rise of the Greater Khorasan Civilization (GKC) of Bronze Age is being considered. But this interaction sphere of Central Asia goes back even further as far as the early fourth millennium BCE, for example at important sites such as Tepe Hissar in northeastern Iran. The name Khorāsān is Persian (from Middle Persian Xwarāsān, sp. xwlʾsʾn', meaning "where the sun arrives from" or "the Eastern Province"). The name was first given to the eastern province of Persia (Ancient Iran) during the Sasanian Empire and was used from the late Middle Ages in distinction to neighbouring Transoxiana. The Sassanian name Xwarāsān has in turn been argued to be a calque of the Bactrian name of the region, Miirosan (Bactrian spelling: μιιροσανο, μιροσανο, earlier μιυροασανο), which had the same meaning 'sunrise, east' (corresponding to a hypothetical Proto-Iranian form *miθrāsāna; see Mithra, Bactrian μιυρο [mihr], for the relevant solar deity). The province was often subdivided into four quarters, such that Nishapur (present-day Iran), Marv (present-day Turkmenistan), Herat and Balkh (present-day Afghanistan) were the centers, respectively, of the westernmost, northernmost, central, and easternmost quarters. Khorasan was first established as an administrative division in the 6th century (approximately after 520) by the Sasanians, during the reign of Kavad I (r. 488–496, 498/9–531) or Khosrow I (r. 531–579), and comprised the eastern and northeastern parts of the empire. The use of Bactrian Miirosan 'the east' as an administrative designation under Alkhan rulers in the same region is possibly the forerunner of the Sasanian administrative division of Khurasan, occurring after their takeover of Hephthalite territories south of the Oxus. The transformation of the term and its identification with a larger region is thus a development of the late Sasanian and early Islamic periods. Early Islamic usage often regarded everywhere east of Jibal or what was subsequently termed Iraq Ajami (Persian Iraq), as being included in a vast and loosely defined region of Khorasan, which might even extend to the Indus Valley and the Pamir Mountains. The boundary between these two was the region surrounding the cities of Gurgan and Qumis. In particular, the Ghaznavids, Seljuqs and Timurids divided their empires into Iraqi and Khorasani regions. Khorasan is believed to have been bounded in the southwest by desert and the town of Tabas, known as "the Gate of Khorasan",: 562 from which it extended eastward to the mountains of central Afghanistan. Sources from the 10th century onwards refer to areas in the south of the Hindu Kush as the Khorasan Marches, forming a frontier region between Khorasan and Hindustan. Geography First established in the 6th century as one of four administrative (military) divisions by the Sasanian Empire, the scope of the region has varied considerably during its nearly 1,500-year history. Initially, the Khorasan division of the Sasanian Empire covered the northeastern military gains of the empire, at its height including cities such as Nishapur, Herat, Merv, Faryab, Taloqan, Balkh, Bukhara, Badghis, Abiward, Gharjistan, Tus and Sarakhs. With the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate, the designation was inherited and likewise stretched as far as their military gains in the east, starting off with the military installations at Nishapur and Merv, slowly expanding eastwards into Tokharistan and Sogdia. Under the Caliphs, Khorasan was the name of one of the three political zones under their dominion (the other two being Eraq-e Arab "Arabic Iraq" and Eraq-e Ajam "Non-Arabic Iraq or Persian Iraq").[citation needed] Under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, Khorasan was divided into four major sections or quarters (rub′), each section based on a single major city: Nishapur, Merv, Herat and Balkh. By the 10th century, Ibn Khordadbeh and the Hudud al-'Alam mentions what roughly encompasses the previous regions of Abarshahr, Tokharistan and Sogdia as Khwarasan proper. They further report the southern part of the Hindu Kush, i.e. the regions of Sistan, Rukhkhudh, Zabulistan and Kabul etc. to make up the Khorasan marches, a frontier region between Khorasan and Hindustan. By the late Middle Ages, the term lost its administrative significance, in the west only being loosely applied among the Turko-Persian dynasties of modern Iran to all its territories that lay east and north-east of the Dasht-e Kavir desert. It was therefore subjected to constant change, as the size of their empires changed. In the east, Khwarasan likewise became a term associated with the great urban centers of Central Asia. It is mentioned in the Baburnama (from the 1580s) that: The people of Hindustān call every country beyond their own Khorasān, in the same manner as the Arabs term all except Arabia, Ajem. On the road between Hindustān and Khorasān, there are two great marts: the one Kābul, the other Kandahār. Caravans, from Ferghāna, Tūrkestān, Samarkand, Balkh, Bokhāra, Hissār, and Badakhshān, all resort to Kābul; while those from Khorasān repair to Kandahār. This country lies between Hindustān and Khorasān. In modern times, the term has been source of great nostalgia and nationalism, especially amongst the Tajiks of Central Asia.[citation needed] Many Tajiks regard Khorasan as an integral part of their national identity, which has preserved an interest in the term, including its meaning and cultural significance, both in common discussion and academia, despite its falling out of political use in the region. According to Afghan historian Ghulam Mohammad Ghobar (1897–1978), Afghanistan's current Persian-speaking territories formed the major portion of Khorasān, as two of the four main capitals of Khorasān (Herat and Balkh) are now located in Afghanistan. Ghobar uses the terms "Proper Khorasan" and "Improper Khorasan" in his book to distinguish between the usage of Khorasān in its strict sense and its usage in a loose sense. According to him, Proper Khorasan contained regions lying between Balkh in the east, Merv in the north, Sistan in the south, Nishapur in the west and Herat, known as the Pearl of Khorasan, in the center. Improper Khorasan's boundaries extended to as far as Hazarajat and Kabul in the east, Baluchistan in the south, Transoxiana and Khwarezm in the north, and Damghan and Gorgan in the west. History During the Sasanian era, likely in the reign of Khusrow I, Persia was divided into four regions (known as kust Middle Persian), Khwārvarān in the west, apāxtar in the north, nīmrūz in the south and Khorasan in the east. Since the Sasanian territories were more or less remained stable up to Islamic conquests, it can be concluded that Sasanian Khorasan was bordered to the south by Sistan and Kerman, to the west by the central deserts of modern Iran, and to the east by China and India. In the Sasanian era, Khorasan was further divided into four smaller regions, and each region was ruled by a marzban. These four regions were Nishapur, Marv, Herat and Balkh. Khorasan in the east saw some conflict with the Hephthalites who became the new rulers in the area but the borders remained stable. Being the eastern parts of the Sassanids and further away from Arabia, Khorasan region was conquered after the remaining Persia.[citation needed] The last Sassanid king of Persia, Yazdgerd III, moved the throne to Khorasan following the Arab invasion in the western parts of the empire. After the assassination of the king, Khorasan was conquered by Arab Muslims in 647 AD. Like other provinces of Persia it became a province of the Umayyad Caliphate. The first movement against the Arab conquest was led by Abu Muslim Khorasani between 747 and 750. Originally from Isfahan, scholars believe Abu Muslim was probably Persian. It's possible he may have been born a slave. According to the ancient Persian historian Al-Shahrastani, he was a Kaysanite. This revolutionary Shi'a movement rejected the three Caliphs that had preceded Ali. Abu Muslim helped the Abbasids come to power but was later killed by Al-Mansur, an Abbasid Caliph.[citation needed] The first kingdom independent from Arab rule was established in Khorasan by Tahir Phoshanji in 821, but it seems that it was more a matter of political and territorial gain. Tahir had helped the Caliph subdue other nationalistic movements in other parts of Persia such as Maziar's movement in Tabaristan. Other major independent dynasties who ruled over Khorasan were the Saffarids from Zaranj (861–1003), Samanids from Bukhara (875–999), Ghaznavids from Ghazni (963–1167), Seljuqs (1037–1194), Khwarezmids (1077–1231), Ghurids (1149–1212), and Timurids (1370–1506). In 1221, Genghis Khan's son Tolui oversaw the Mongol subjugation of Khorasan, carrying out the task "with a thoroughness from which that region has never recovered." Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, the majority of Islamic archaeological efforts were focused on the medieval era, predominantly in areas near what is today Central Asia. Under Caliph Umar (r. 634–644), the Rashidun Caliphate seized nearly the entire Persia from the Sasanian Empire. However, the areas of Khorasan weren't conquered until c. 651 during the caliphate of Uthman (r. 644–656).[citation needed] The Rashidun commanders Ahnaf ibn Qays and Abd Allah ibn Amir were assigned to lead the invasion of Khorasan. In late 651, the Rashidun army defeated the combined forces of the Sasanian and the First Turkic Khaganate in the Battle of the Oxus River.[citation needed] The next year, Ibn Amir concluded a peace treaty with Kanadbak, an Iranian nobleman and the kanarang of Tus. The Sasanian rebel Burzin Shah, of the Karen family, revolted against Ibn Amir, though the latter crushed the rebels in the Battle of Nishapur. After the invasion of Persia under Rashidun was completed in five years and almost all of the Persian territories came under Arab control, it also inevitable created new problems for the caliphate. Pockets of tribal resistance continued for centuries in the Afghan territories. During the 7th century, Arab armies made their way into the region of Afghanistan from Khorasan.[citation needed] A second problem was as a corollary to the Muslim conquest of Persia, the Muslims became neighbors of the city states of Transoxiana. Although Transoxiana was included in the loosely defined "Turkestan" region, only the ruling elite of Transoxiana was partially of Turkic origins whereas the local population was mostly a diverse mix of local Iranian populations. As the Arabs reached Transoxiana following the conquest of the Sassanid Persian Empire, local Iranian-Turkic and Arab armies clashed over the control of Transoxiana's Silk Road cities.[citation needed] In particular, the Turgesh under the leadership of Suluk, and Khazars under Barjik clashed with their Arab neighbours in order to control this economically important region. Two notable Umayyad generals, Qutayba ibn Muslim and Nasr ibn Sayyar, were instrumental in the eventual conquest.[citation needed] In July 738, at the age of 74, Nasr was appointed as governor of Khorasan. Despite his age, he was widely respected both for his military record, his knowledge of the affairs of Khorasan and his abilities as a statesman. Julius Wellhausen wrote of him that "His age did not affect the freshness of his mind, as is testified not only by his deeds, but also by the verses in which he gave expression to his feelings till the very end of his life". However, in the climate of the times, his nomination owed more to his appropriate tribal affiliation than his personal qualities. In 724, immediately after the rise of Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik (r. 724–743) to the throne, Asad's brother Khalid al-Qasri was appointed to the important post of governor of Iraq, with responsibility over the entire Islamic East, which he held until 738. Khalid in turn named Asad as governor of Khorasan. The two brothers thus became, according to Patricia Crone, "among the most prominent men of the Marwanid period". Asad's arrival in Khorasan found the province in peril: his predecessor, Muslim ibn Sa'id al-Kilabi, had just attempted a campaign against Ferghana and suffered a major defeat, the so-called "Day of Thirst", at the hands of the Turgesh Turks and the Soghdian principalities of Transoxiana that had risen up against Muslim rule. From the early days of the Muslim conquests, Arab armies were divided into regiments drawn from individual tribes or tribal confederations (butun or 'asha'ir). Despite the fact that many of these groupings were recent creations, created for reasons of military efficiency rather than any common ancestry, they soon developed a strong and distinct identity.[citation needed] By the beginning of the Umayyad period, this system progressed to the formation of ever-larger super-groupings, culminating in the two super-groups: the northern Arab Mudaris or Qaysis, and the south Arabs or "Yemenis" (Yaman), dominated by the Azd and Rabi'ah tribes.[citation needed] By the 8th century, this division had become firmly established across the Caliphate and was a source of constant internal instability, as the two groups formed in essence two rival political parties, jockeying for power and separated by a fierce hatred for each other. During Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik's reign, the Umayyad government appointed Mudaris as governors in Khorasan, except for Asad ibn Abdallah al-Qasri's tenure in 735–738. Nasr's appointment came four months after Asad's death.[citation needed] In the interim, the sources report variously that the province was run either by the Syrian general Ja'far ibn Hanzala al-Bahrani or by Asad's lieutenant Juday' al-Kirmani. At any rate, the sources agree that al-Kirmani stood at the time as the most prominent man in Khorasan and should have been the clear choice for governor. His Yemeni roots (he was the leader of the Azd in Khorasan), however, made him unpalatable to the Caliph. Khorasan became the headquarters of the Abbasid Revolution against the Umayyads. It was led by Abu Muslim, who himself belonged to Khorasan. This province was part of the Iranian world that had been heavily colonised by Arab tribes following the Muslim conquest with the intent of replacing Umayyad dynasty which is proved to be successful under the sign of the Black Standard. Between the early 16th and early 18th centuries, parts of Khorasan were contested between the Safavids and the Uzbeks. A part of the Khorasan region was conquered in 1722 by the Ghilji Pashtuns from Kandahar and became part of the Hotaki dynasty from 1722 to 1729. Nader Shah recaptured Khorasan in 1729 and chose Mashhad as the capital of Persia. Following his assassination in 1747, the eastern parts of Khorasan, including Herat were annexed with the Durrani Empire. Mashhad area was under control of Nader Shah's grandson Shahrukh Afshar until it was captured by the Qajar dynasty in 1796.[citation needed] In 1856, the Iranians, under the Qajar dynasty, briefly recaptured Herat; by the Treaty of Paris of 1857, signed between Iran and the British Empire to end the Anglo-Persian War, the Iranian troops withdrew from Herat. Later, in 1881, Iran relinquished its claims to a part of the northern areas of Khorasan to the Russian Empire, principally comprising Merv, by the Treaty of Akhal (also known as the Treaty of Akhal-Khorasan). Cultural importance Khorasan has had a great cultural importance among other regions in Greater Iran. The literary New Persian language developed in Khorasan and Transoxiana and gradually supplanted the Parthian language. The New Persian literature arose and flourished in Khorasan and Transoxiana where the early Iranian dynasties such as Tahirids, Samanids, Saffirids and Ghaznavids (a Turco-Persian dynasty) were based.[citation needed] Until the devastating Mongol invasion of the 13th century, Khorasan remained the cultural capital of Persia. It has produced scientists such as Avicenna, Al-Farabi, Al-Biruni, Omar Khayyam, Al-Khwarizmi, Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi (known as Albumasar or Albuxar in the west), Alfraganus, Abu Wafa, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, and many others who are widely well known for their significant contributions in various domains such as mathematics, astronomy, medicine, physics, geography, and geology. There have been many archaeological sites throughout Khorasan, however many of these expeditions were illegal or committed in the sole pursuit of profit, leaving many sites without documentation or record. See also References Further reading 36°N 62°E / 36°N 62°E / 36; 62 |
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[SOURCE: https://www.wired.com/story/the-big-interview-podcast-jonathan-nolan-fallout/] | [TOKENS: 19154] |
Katie DrummondCultureFeb 3, 2026 7:00 AMFallout Producer Jonathan Nolan on AI: ‘We’re in Such a Frothy Moment’The Westworld showrunner thinks AI will be good for burgeoning filmmakers, but not for Hollywood blockbusters.Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty ImagesCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyJonathan Nolan saw this coming. As a screenwriter, he’s worked on several of his brother Christopher Nolan’s films, from Interstellar to the Dark Knight movies. Partnered with his wife Lisa Joy, he created HBO’s Westworld and executive produced Amazon Prime’s Fallout. But before that, he cut his TV teeth creating Person of Interest, a CBS procedural about a solitary tech billionaire who creates a piece of surveillance software aimed at stopping crime before it happens. It was fiction, but it’s hard not to feel its prescience.With Fallout, now in its second season, Nolan also has his sights on the future. Based on the video game series of the same name, it’s about a postapocalyptic America where everyone must survive in any way they can. It’s also wickedly funny and full of 1950s-era retrofuturism.So, what does Nolan see happening in the coming decades? A lot. For one, he doesn’t think AI is going to replace human filmmakers. In fact, he thinks it could help aspiring directors get a foot in the door. (Though, he says, he will never use it in his own writing.) He’d also like to see the demise of (most) social media—but understands that may never happen.For this week’s episode of The Big Interview podcast, I asked Nolan about all of those things and more. Below you’ll find his thoughts on writing Batman movies, classic cars, and what he’d actually bring to his own doomsday bunker.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.KATIE DRUMMOND: Jonathan Nolan, welcome to The Big Interview.JONATHAN NOLAN: Thank you for having me.I’m delighted to have you here in person in New York. It’s very cold. I’m from Canada so my barometer is a little off, but …I’m from Chicago. I tend to think of New York as wimpy cold.No, no, this is real. The older I get the weaker and more frail. So I can’t tolerate [it].I've been in LA for 25 years. Completely useless.So we're both totally useless. It's going to be a great conversation. We always like to start these discussions with a little warmup. Actually, this might help today of all days. But this is just a warmup for your brain, some very fast questions. Are you ready?The reason I became a writer is because I was no good at answering fast questions. So I’m going to flub this.Oh good. This will be the whole hour.That's it.What is the most overused sci-fi trope?Ooh! Faster-than-light travel.Why?Because it's a sort of story convenience, and I guess we used it in Interstellar, but we use it in a slightly backhanded way, which is a wormhole. Which doesn't quite feel the same, but effectively it's the same thing. It's just a way to skip the boring bits.What's a book you go back to over and over?Of late, I go back to all of the Iain Banks Culture books. Years ago, I was looking for positive portrayals of AI in science fiction.Oh, interesting. We're going to talk about this.It was almost nothing, really nothing. It's kind of James Cameron on one side, and no one on the other side of the roster and Iain Banks, who wrote those books over the course of 20 years, starting in the late ’80s, I think, until his death in the early 2010s. Far too young. But they are the most fully realized and brilliant depiction of a hybrid civilization where you've got people and you've got AI and they have sort of figured it out.What is the weirdest app on your phone right now?The one that has captured the most of my attention—and it's disastrous—is an app called Bring a Trailer.What is that?It’s for buying classic cars. I'm from Chicago. I emigrated to the States when I was 11. When I got my driver's license, I became an American. I've never gone back. Always loved cars.You're a car guy. This did not come up in my research. So you're using an app to look at cars to potentially acquire.Classic old cars, those sorts of things. You know, I love electric cars. I've driven electric cars for years. They're fantastic. But it's very clear we're in this moment, like, I miss the Cretaceous cell phone age, when you had like a million different shapes. You had the ones that flipped and rolled and did all that stuff. Then the iPhone came along and then it's just this banal, incredibly functional [object]. You know, there is no diversity of shape or function. That's what's happening in cars. Like vanishingly quick. Like Trump is trying to hold on and, I mean, you look at China and the barn door's wide open.So you're looking for the eclectic, the diverse …… older, internal combustion cars with manual transmissions.Wow. OK. Well, that is a weird app. What's harder to write—a perfect ending or a perfect pilot?Perfect pilot. Perfect endings are more important. You ascribe value to them because if you don't have an ending, you don't have anything. But in truth, a beginning without an ending is like a joke without a punch line. I walked into JJ Abrams’ office one day, and we talked about movies for a while and I walked out as a showrunner, kind of. I liken the experience to getting my tie caught in a shredder. It was sort of like, “Oh, I’ll do a little bit of this …” Then, 15 or 16 years later, here I am. But writing pilots was a maddening experience. As a film writer, you look at all this cool stuff you have and you'll probably have to cut a few things out. With TV it’s like I have a hundred cool things and I’m going to show you four, and I have to pick the most strategically sound combination of those things. There’s no closure. It’s very difficult.If you had to be trapped in one digital simulation, which would you choose?Oh, wow.We like to have fun with these.You know, and we're both parents, but being able to access, honestly, these years right now, where your kids are still so close and they're relying on you for everything. But they're filled with fascinating insights and it's just, you know, that level of closeness and intimacy and it's just incredible. My brother's kids are older. I see how this goes. It's wonderful. It's wonderful the whole way through. But you never quite get this moment again.Well, don't make me cry. So you would want to live in a digital simulation of your reality with relatively young kids, who still love and adore you and think you're the best thing.Well, let’s not get carried away. I'm not sure if they love and adore me, but they tolerate me.You want to live in a digital simulation where your kids still tolerate you.Yes. I'll take it.That hits. I would, too. I would love to live in that world forever.Yeah. Ugh. For sure.Google Search or ChatGPT?Google Search for sure.Agree. Now, you wrote the short story that became the film Memento. Do you have any tattoos and what are they?My sister-in-law, Emma, and I, who produced that film, were talking during the production about getting tattoos. Then we chickened out.No, come on.If you don't get one when you're making that movie, you're never getting a tattoo, so …Never.I am a blank slate, as they say.What is the most Luddite part of your creative workflow?I wouldn't categorize it as Luddite, but we're still shooting everything on film. I mean, we can come back to this later, because it relates to the AI of it all, but the promise of digital cameras was that they would save enormous amounts of money. My contention is, and this relates to AI as well, there is no technology that I've ever been presented with, and I've been doing this for 25 years, that has made anything that we do for television cheaper, ever. If you plot the economics of film or television over the last 50 years, I would challenge anyone to point to the inflection point where digital cameras came in and democratized it. Because they never did. So we shoot it on film because it costs the same, and it looks better.Lastly, what is one must-have for your doomsday bunker?Nintendo Switch.And some games, I assume.Yeah, for sure.Do you have a doomsday bunker?If you have a doomsday bunker, I think it's like Fight Club: The first rule is you don't tell people you have a doomsday bunker. There's no bunker.Not yet.I'm a techno optimist.Let me ask you: When I was getting ready to meet you, I was looking back at your career and looking at Person of Interest. Reading about that really took me back. Interstellar. Fallout. There aren't many people, I would say, in film and TV who have so consistently approached tech and science and AI with the consistency and the breadth that you have. You have stuck with these themes. What keeps you coming back to those subjects?That’s a very flattering way of saying that I get a little stuck.Come on. It’s a big field.I wrote a film for my brother and David Hayman at Warner Bros. that never got made, that had enough overlap with Inception and then with Person of Interest. We never quite circled back to it. But it was about AI, it was about AI as a bad guy.And is this sort of early 2000s?2005. And it didn't go, but I got fascinated by the subject. I did a lot of research; I did a lot of looking into it. The next hit for me was the robot characters in Interstellar. I went from one project to the next and I was like, “Wouldn't it be fun to write robots?” You know, the tension of the robot crew member, whether it's Alien or pretty much any version of this, is that they will eventually mutiny and murder everyone, and they have a secret agenda.But what if they didn't? What if they were just all of the virtues that we found the most beautiful, right? What if they were brave, self-sacrificing, sarcastic, and funny. Amazing leaders. What if they just embodied those values the whole way through? Maybe you'd give the audience a slight discomfort at first. Then this kind of interesting feeling of, “Oh, OK, that's one path.” Right? It's not written that the path has to be this sort of human form of xenophobia.I’d also gotten fascinated with this idea of what happens when you have this fire hose of data that's out there. What if something could pick through it and find patterns and find meaning.That proved to be very prescient, I must say.Actually, sorry, I missed a piece there. In The Dark Knight, there is a plot twist about mass surveillance. Bruce Wayne builds this ethically-challenged system of stealing information, doing echo location from everyone's cell phone and giving him the ability to map the city all at once. That was sort of wrestling with this idea of how much do we trust the people protecting us, with the government surveilling us, and what good could they put that to? So the idea of mass surveillance being organized into and filtered into something that could help people is something I've been fascinated with, and that is an origin point for AI, a natural one.When we were trying to put together Westworld, which is obviously where we got closest to this subject, Anthony Hopkins was interested. Then, as always happens, the studio and the agents kind of battled back and forth for a little bit too long and we started to get a sense that we were going to lose Tony on this one. So I wrote him a letter. The letter had a line, it was a thought that had occurred to me walking home one night, and it went like this: “We lived before, before.” What is a little harder to define, but you can feel it, you can feel this bump in the road, this inflection point. It's a really big one, and you feel it coming very quickly. You can't quite picture a big wave like Interstellar. You don't know what's on the far side of it, but you know it's coming. For me, that has been about this moment that we're now standing in the middle of.So, we started writing these films and watching what was happening in the series. And this is the story of our time. So the question for me would be like, “Why would you write about anything else, really?”When you think about writing that letter and of feeling like you were on the precipice of something that I think a lot of people had no idea they were on the precipice of, how do you feel standing in the middle of it, having been someone who years ago was pointing at it? What is that experience like for you?There's no trace of “I told you so,” because I didn't know what to say, and I still don't know. I think we're in the middle of that wave, but a lot of what's happening right now with salesmanship … a lot of what's happening right now is hype. We're dealing with that in our business. We were very scared, in film and television, about what was right around the corner. A lot of that was hype. We're two years into it, now we're up against the next contract negotiation and it's like, OK, well, how much fruit has that borne? How much does that really change what we do?I think when we actually sit down to use these tools and think about what these tools do, I'm almost completely riven between two totally opposing worldviews.One, that these tools are really just sort of a glorified browser search function with the right economic activity and brilliance being applied to them. I never imagined that consciousness. I don't believe that there's something specific or privileged about human consciousness. This is something, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about for Westworld.The flip side of that belief is that something as simple as an LLM could give rise to cognition on a level that becomes increasingly hard to distinguish from human cognition. At which point we are certainly in the middle of the thing that I was seeing. Because there've been so many false starts with AI over a hundred years. These moments where it’s like, “here it comes,” and everyone kind of braces for it, and we have a lot of conversations like this, and then a couple of years later it peters out a little bit.Right around when I started my job here at WIRED, so like two-and-a-half years ago, it was all of a sudden the only thing anyone could talk about. Of course a lot of that was genuinely fascinating advances in this research and in these tools. Then, to your point, it was marketing and hype and hyperbole. And commercialization. There’s a need for some of these companies to show a return on their investment. It's really hard to make sense of it. How do you educate yourself when this is all moving so quickly?It's tough. One of the ways, and it wasn't anything we set out to do, but because of the success of Westworld—HBO at the time was positioning itself as a tech company to try to get sold and compete with Netflix—so the first time we showed that pilot to any large group of people was an event that [former HBO CEO] Richard Plepler arranged with [investor] Yuri Milner at his enormous house in Mountain View. We showed the pilot and then did a Q&A afterwards. Sam Altman was the MC. He had all his Y Combinator folks there watching.So from the beginning we were picked up and tossed into that group of people; over the course of making that show we wound up becoming quite close with some of the people leading the charge here. So I was hearing stories 15 years ago about what was happening at DeepMind before Google acquired it. There's sort of a criteria for when to terminate an experiment, and that went straight into Westworld. And weirdly, [we] unintentionally had a front-row seat to a lot of what has transpired in the last 10 to 15 years. So staying close to it and listening to it.But even now, the pace, the pitch, the tenor of things is moving so quickly. We're in such a frothy moment. Which I immediately distrust …Yeah, I don't love froth.It usually means a bubble burst or a sleight of hand rather than [something] genuine. We're still invited to these conversations, these closed-door conversations with people who are leading the charge here.So you are still very close to that industry. You're getting a front-row seat.Yeah. Yeah.Must be very interesting.It is fascinating.I know these are closed-door meetings. I assume they're off the record. But has anything come out of them, even a notion or something that nudged you in a certain direction or changed the way you were thinking about the technology?A hundred percent.I think an observation that I started, and then was bounced back and forth with a friend who's leading one of the leading companies, was we'd spent a day working with this team talking about what you can do with these things. You know, where's it all going? What are the applications for it? Because I think that is one of the bigger questions.I think for the first time in a very long time, there may be moments like in the middle of the Second World War with so many technologies just kind of pouring out of the war effort. You know, the amount of brilliance over 40 years to get to this place, you don't want overnight success, right? The actor, singer, who finally gets the Oscar, Grammy, whatever, has been doing this for 20 years. These neural nets have been around for a very, very long time. Not an overnight success, but pretty much to your point, two-and-a half years ago, suddenly went from an obscure talking point for computer scientists to an everyday fact for all of our kids. Everyone. All over the place.It occurred to me that unlike some of these technologies over the years, the applications for which were slightly more clear, this is more like an alien spaceship crash-landed on the face of the planet. Each of these companies and all of us are exploring the ruins of it. We kind of walk into one room and we're like, “Oh shit, I can do teleportation.” Go to another room and it's like, “OK, I can make movies.” It's less like we're making these things and more like we're sort of stumbling upon them, because we've created something so powerful and so recursive that it can spew out, almost weekly or monthly, these wonders.I remember the first time I saw videos from Veo, the first launch where you kinda looked at it and you went, “Oh boy.” Because this is what I do for a living. And we spend an awful lot of money to build shots, with effects that look good.I have a lot of friends in the gaming space, I know how much money they're spending to do stuff. Then you've got a product that's like, oh, it's a $10 subscription and you can make this, this, this, the other thing. You know, it is this extraordinary moment where instead of thinking of an application and then chasing it down over the course years using a handful of advanced degrees, it's more like, here is this giant morass and, and you're going to dig around in it and you're going to pull out something from here and something from there.Beyond the hype, these technologies are genuinely transformative. There's no question about it. They're going to transform education and medicine, all the usual things that everyone talks about. They're going to transform culture. We haven't reckoned with the social consequences. Forget putting the genie back in the bottle. How do we convince the genie not to destroy whole segments of the economy?Who can tell the genie what to do and what not to do? I’m sure that’s top of mind in the context of your industry, but even more broadly than that. You’re a parent. You’re thinking about what this means for your kids in 20 years.Or next year.Exactly.It's scary, it's exciting. Certainly some of these products give you lots of good reasons to be cynical, but I've had a couple of conversations with people who were at the forefront of these things who really have a very clear and very compelling humanist perspective on this.They think about kids who are disadvantaged, who don't have access to the kinds of things that our kids may have access to. We saw this in a pandemic, right? We were able to take our kids and make a little school in the back of our house and hire a teacher. We just re-created what we could do.The idea that these tools could be, say, a tutor that never forgets a question they’ve asked you. That, while you’re sleeping, researches scholarships. That might be a perfect way to get these things, especially for kids who don’t have those advantages. It might really be leveling the playing field. These tools are largely free. So the paradox of this thing is you say, “Who has the keys to these things?” You know, I'm very—I am very concerned about that.One of the interesting comments that you made about AI, this was in an interview in Semafor last year, was about how you use it. They asked if you used AI to write and you said, “Oh god, no. That’s crossing the Rubicon.”Yeah.Do you see uses for it? Do you draw a hard line in the sand and just say “absolutely not.” Where do you see AI in terms of art and creativity?I guess there's one way to take that quote, which is that it is sort of a political thing. It's not at all; it's more superstitious, right? There are writers who love to write. There are writers who suffer through writing. I suffer through writing, I find writing exceptionally difficult. I love having written. There's nothing like the feeling of having written something and feeling that you got it.How does that look for you?A lot of sitting there and kind of bashing my head against the wall. A lot of pacing, a lot of chocolate, a lot of walks. And that's the problem, right? I used to smoke. When I was writing the first movie I ever got paid to write, which is The Prestige, I started out smoking as I had smoked through college. And I realized that if I finished that script and I was still smoking, I would never quit. Because if the script was good …I think many writers, if you're listening to this, you know exactly what he's talking about.I managed to quit cold turkey halfway through the script, so that I could never point to that script if it was a good script, if it worked, and think like, “I really gotta go back.” It would just pull you in every time. I think about AI the same way. That’s no assessment of its virtues. I just think if I let it into my creative process, which is already so fraught, that I would never find my way back.But it's terrific for research. Say you’re doing an adaptation or a reboot or something like that. You can get into it and you can ask questions. Like, “Tell me where in the book series such-and-such character first talked about their childhood.” It’s a way to speed through some of those harder aspects of corralling. So it has enormous use.There is a wonderful notion that we’re going to save money somehow. It’s never gotten cheaper. I was talking to [Fallout video game director] Todd Howard about this on the gaming side of things. Those games are just like big movies. They’ve just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. Nothing ever makes it cheaper. Digital cameras didn't make it cheaper. The digital postproduction process didn't make it cheaper.So you think the idea that artificial intelligence could wipe out a bunch of jobs and take costs down for film and TV production is nonstarter nonsense?It's entirely possible. There's this wonderful quote from The New Yorker a few months ago where it basically said that it’s about the gullibility of management of these companies if they think these tools can replace everyone. It’s because they’ve been overhyped, right? It managed to scare all of us during the strike. This is part of the reason the strike went on so long. If they made bad decisions, the consequences would be catastrophic.But assuming that people still want a certain number of big movies every year and a certain number of big shows every year, the applications for these tools … You know, there's been a lot of hand-wringing, a lot of arguments, a lot of conversations in my town. And God bless them, that technology companies will come down to sort of make nice. It's literally like the delegation from Northern California comes to visit with the Southern California delegation.I mean, they barely bother with the New York delegation of journalism anymore, so I’m glad to hear they’re still talking to you guys.Sometimes those meetings are somewhat contentious. Last time I was at one of those, someone sort of trotted out this metaphor that they were Uber drivers and we were taxi drivers. I said, “OK, maybe. But maybe you’re Uber and we’re Formula One drivers.”Oh, I like that.Not to sound self-aggrandizing.Oh, seize the power.Uber has no relevance to, you know, Ferrari. I'm a car guy, right? Maybe Uber helps the fans get to the race, but it's not the race, right? Those technologies have nothing to do with the race. What these technologies will do, and I think they're incredible in this, is give access to the next generation of filmmakers who don't even have it.There's a generation of filmmakers who would never have got to Hollywood. I hope that Hollywood will remain an important epicenter of culture creation and filmmaking, because these people will eventually get fed up with the prompt version of filmmaking and they'll come, as so many of us have done for a hundred years now, and try to convince someone to give them some money to hire a proper Hollywood crew and go make a real movie.I would point to Sean Baker, a terrific filmmaker. After he made Tangerine famously on an iPhone, the next year I was watching The Florida Project and I was taken aback. I was like, “I gotta reconsider my whole position on film, because this movie’s beautiful.” Then I got to the end and I Googled it and, of course, he shot it on 35 millimeter. He got there with an iPhone, and his last three films have been shot on film, because you use the tools that allow you to raise your hand and say, “Hey, look at me. Look at what I'm doing.” This is my fervent hope.Because film is ultimately a collaborative medium. That’s maybe the scariest part of these technologies, they’re not collaborative.The isolationist aspect.That’s like writing. Writing sucks.It does suck.Filmmaking's amazing because it's me and 800 of our friends.So it’s this idea of ,“Well, how did you get your big break?” “Oh, I made a film with AI and someone saw it.”I think that's awesome. As long as it doesn't replace [anyone] and as long as we don't go through this moment where people think, “Oh, we can do all this content for peanuts.” It's like, “Well, no, you've always had the ability to do that. It's called B movies.” B movies have always been there. And independent films, which is where I started. You've always been able to make the lower-cost version of it. But then there has always still been the AAA version of it.I sometimes describe my job as photographing beautiful people in beautiful places. And the people part is important. The fact that the actors are real people and it matters to audiences. I think that matters a lot. The culture of celebrity, the idea of that connection you have to them. Then I started working in television and the bond that people have with television actors is different and much deeper. This is a long-lost member of their family.You seem very sensitive about cost and the idea of spending less money to produce great work. You gave a speech at the Saturn Awards and said, quote, “As producers, we are not just here to save people money.” You were speaking in the context of bringing production back to California, which you did with the second season of Fallout. What do you think about the financial pressures of your industry? What kind of fight are you fighting to try to get the resources that you need to do the work you want to do?It's a great question, and it reminds me that there is one technology over the years that has radically altered the economics of film. I'm not sure if you'd say it's actually materially changed the trend line, but it definitely altered the economics and that technology is the tax rebate. That’s not a technology, but it is an innovation.As the recipient of funds from the great state of New York, the great state of California, the United Kingdom, Utah—everywhere we go, if there's a rebate, we'll try to take advantage of it. You know, you want to put as much money on the screen as you can.Part of the reason I was so worked up in that speech was not just that a fire had destroyed the homes of 10 of our crew members on Fallout and a dozen of our friends. It was that I had just started to get an idea from my crew. We have a terrific crew. A lot of them worked with us on Westworld, so we’ve worked with some of these folks for a decade or more. These are folks who are the best at what they do, and usually when we have a wrap party, not so many people can make it because they’re in such high demand. They’re already on to the next thing. For the second season of Fallout, everyone’s at the wrap party. I was like “Oh no, this is a problem.” They haven't been hired. There's no production. I mean, it's been a catastrophe, an absolute catastrophe.Also, the complicity of studios, and studio production heads and producers being willing to go along with, “Well, look, we could make this in California or New York, but we’re going to make it in Hungary because we'll be able to do it for $30 or $40 million less."I think that's been an incredibly shortsighted and foolish thing for us to do.The New York Times story where I found that quote, by the way, is actually about you bringing the second season of Fallout to California. You moved production back, and you were really vocal about pushing for the industry to do the same with more projects. Have you seen progress in that direction since that push?I think it's very easy to be cynical about state politics. But they were incredibly thoughtful and smart. In a year in which you have enormous challenges from the incoming Trump administration, enormous challenges for the state of California's budget, they cleared a much bigger incentive to try to make sure that California remained competitive.It's not big enough. It’s never big enough. Georgia essentially has an uncapped one. But it was a huge shot in the arm. These things move slowly. It's a really big cruise ship. It turns really slowly.It'll take a while to undo some of the damage, but I'm hopeful that what the state legislators and the governor was able to pass will give us the best shot for keeping Hollywood Hollywood for another hundred years.I have to ask you about Fallout. The show is, of course, based on a video game franchise that has many decades of history. The second season of the show premiered about a month ago, and new episodes are now coming out on Amazon every week. How do you describe the show to people who aren't familiar with the game, who maybe don't have the years of lore and history and maybe haven't watched it yet?I don't think I ever quite dialed in the elevator pitch, but it is along the lines of: What if the world ended but it didn't completely end? I started as a fan of the games …You've said you played, I think, Fallout 3 and it destroyed a year of your life, consumed a year of your life.It's the Annie Hall thing, right? There goes another novel.These games are incredible, and one of the things about the games that Todd makes—Todd Howard is the creative mastermind behind the latter-day Fallout games—is that they're essentially infinite, right? You can just play them and play them and play them and play them.One of the things they had, I thought, that was very unique about them—and this was a bit of a stretch for me as a filmmaker—was that they are this combination of darkness and violence and interesting questions about technology and identity, but they're also really weird and funny and gonzo and strange. Yes, they're about the end of the world. There are lots of stories about the end of the world. But these ones are weirdly optimistic. It feels like they're more about the beginning of a new world. They're more about, OK, well, culture would rebuild itself. Let's play in the mess that ensues.It's a retro-futuristic world. It resembles the 1950s, right? The music, the imagery, this focus on traditionalism. You didn't make that choice. It was inherent in the franchise, but why do you think it's set in that time period, which I think is not representative of the experience of all Americans. I think it was actually a very dark time. But there's this fixation on 1950s Americana as this perfect moment for the United States, at least in hindsight. How have you thought about that in working on the show?The sort of common lore is what defines the Fallout universe. Each of the games have different characters, they have a different setting, but they're all connected by this world, the world that was before. Look, you've seen a whole political movement built out of the nostalgia for that world, right? That world had a coherence and an appeal, even if it was rooted in all kinds of ugly, terrible shit.There was an unadulterated vision of America as the victor in the Second World War, and this force for good. Was it true? Well, in so many ways no, but in several important ways, yes. You know, they hadn't yoked the entire world under a Pax Americana; they hadn't taken over all these countries. They found maybe a sneakier way to do it. They pulled everyone into the Bretton Woods system. They pulled everyone into this kinda like free-to-play, free-trade system, which was powerful, and it created a world where you didn't have another world war for a very long time.American culture predominated and American culture had a lot of darkness in there, but largely spoke to values that I think a lot of us can get behind in terms of freedom and equity. And eventually, even if it was hypocrisy in the beginning, all these wonderful things that it's easy to be nostalgic about, and I think is therefore kind of ripe fruit.If you're going to think about America’s fall from grace, you'd probably fall from that moment. But if that moment is extended, that’s a fascinating thing. What if you extended that for a hundred years and you took the promise of nuclear technology seriously? I always thought that was such a lovely and incisive and satirical place to start.Was anything surprising to you about how the show has been received? When it's based on this franchise that has such a fandom and lore and such history—it's a lot of pressure.A lot of pressure. I sort of trained at the DC school of fan pressure with the three Batman movies that I worked on with my brother. I learned a lot of lessons there in terms of approaching something because you love it, not because you’re trying to figure out why someone else loves it. And you have to trust that hopefully you’re finding the right things in there. You're never going to please everyone. But if you come at it from a place of genuine respect and love, I think you'll probably do OK. There's going to be some people who are pissed off at you, and you just have to be OK with that.Just don't read the comments.Oh God, no. Yeah. I gave up on that a long, long time ago.I think when you talked to GQ, you said your disappointment with the internet over the last 20 years is “fucking bottomless.” So I had to assume that you were no longer reading Reddit threads about your show.No, sadly. Because I really love that community.I wanted to make sure to ask you a little bit about the politics of it all, which is to say that there are a lot of political themes that emerge in Fallout. We've talked about surveillance and the tools of the state. The apparatus. When you are working on a show and you're weaving these themes in, how do you make determinations about how overt and obvious to be as opposed to doing it in a more nuanced way?Look, fundamentally, philosophically for me, I do not feel qualified to tell anyone how to believe. I'm much more interested in poking and asking questions and saying, “Well, should we believe this? Should we question this?” Working on Batman, I made this analogy to a friend with regards to politics and engaging with it. Working on Batman felt like being a Yankee, right? You don’t play for the Yankees as a Democrat or a Republican, right? Taking a 60-year-old American icon and pressing that character into service for a specific, timely political point felt like a very fast path to losing relevance for the story.If you’re reading Dante's Inferno, it's stood the test of time, but it's kind of amazing how much regional politics is still laced into the first three chapters. He's still pissed off with his landlord in the third level of hell, right?Oh my God.It’s like, OK, come on, let's get onto the next part. So, for me, there was always a bit of responsibility to be asking questions, not giving answers. But I have strong political beliefs, and I think as the world has started to feel more incoherent, and making sense of things has become so hard to wade through, and it’s so hard to just talk to each other, it was really nice to work on a project like Fallout. From the very beginning, Graham Wagner, one of our showrunners, was joking that the first season, or the first game rather, could have been written by Adbusters.There's a strong point of view there, and it's a strong political point of view. Poking at things, this is the beauty of working in speculative fiction or in apocalyptic fiction. The world is gone, so we're not talking about this president, we're not talking about that. We're talking about a fictitious world a hundred years in the future, and 200 years after that, where everything has been blown to hell.But you get to pick up the bits, the detritus of our present political situation, potentially, and kind of look at it. That gives you that longer view, which I think allows you to engage. You know, I would challenge anyone to watch both seasons of Fallout and not find a group that doesn't come in for a drubbing. There's this slightly nativist progressivism of the Vault, where it’s like “freedom and safety for everyone, except we're not letting anyone in.” You know, it's kinda the lifeboat, progressivism. Then you have the wild libertarianism, if you want to call it anything, of the Wasteland. So we get to look at all these different things. Again, I don't have any answers, but it's really fun at this moment in time to be able to poke a little more aggressively at some of these things.I don't want to put too much on you, but we’re looking at this show that’s about the world after a collapse at the hands of very powerful conglomerates. So you're out there, you're talking about this show, you're working on the show, you're thinking about it all the time. You read the news. Is it hard for you, as someone who describes themselves as an optimist, not to see collapse everywhere?Yeah. It's kinda what we do, right? We look for the signs. I'm hopeful that we will pull ourselves back from the edge. We've managed to. I thought my brother's movie Oppenheimer ends brilliantly with that warning: It's not over yet. We haven't solved this problem yet. Yeah. We may still yet destroy the world. I think it's incredibly important for us to always remember that.That's why working on a show like Fallout, the timing sadly felt good as a gentle reminder that OK, it may be amusing to live in the wasteland that follows. I don't think any of us watch that show and wish to live in that world, or hope no one wishes to live in that world. But, I think with some thoughtfulness and a little compassion and maybe some slightly better heuristics for our social media, we might make it.We shall see. Before we end, I would love to play a very quick game. It's a game we came up with. It's called Control, Alt, Delete. So, what piece of technology would you love to control? What would you love to alt, so alter or change, and what would you love to delete? What would you vanquish from the Earth if given the opportunity?Got it. I would control AI generated video.All of it.Like I said, I'm so excited not necessarily for what we can do with it—I think it's limited for us—but what it can do for the next generation of filmmakers all over the world. I think it's going to be incredible. It's going to unleash a group of new voices. That's extraordinary.However, one of these conversations with the [tech] folks who come down occasionally and check in with us to let us know how the end of our world is going in very nice ways pointed out, “We watermark very carefully. Every piece of video we generate. But it's totally invisible and no one can see.” I said, “Probably the biggest social problem right now is that you need to make it extremely visible.” You go back to Blade Runner, and I always thought to myself, “God, it's so weird that they don't want the replicants to live on Earth. It was so tragic.” Now I totally understand. Like if you can make a video of the president saying whatever you want, and it's indistinguishable from reality, that has to be regulated yesterday. It will create absolute chaos. If we don't get a handle on that imminently, we're in very, very serious trouble.Well, we're going to hand it to you, so you'll solve that one.For alt, gene therapy. Crispr. Lisa and I are very engaged with someone very close to us in our lives who has a condition caused by a novel nonsense gene. There are thousands of these sorts of conditions, they can have devastating results. I think there's an assumption with everyone that once we got Crispr, we just Ctrl+V and away we go. Right? That's not how it's going to happen. You have these catastrophic diseases where the tool will be there, but the funding won't be there, the resources won't be there. The boring bit is just getting the business model right. Or abandoning the business model and saying, OK, is the government going to start funding some of these things?Um, delete. Social media. I would say all of it, but I have conversations with friends who have kids with special needs and this is their community. So maybe social media’s algorithmic feed. Gone. Dumpster fire. It’s like trans fats or ringtones.Trans fats, ringtones, and the algorithmic feed—Jonathan Nolan’s three agents of destruction.That’s it.I love it. Thank you so much. This was such a fascinating conversation.Likewise.How to ListenYou can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how:If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too. Fallout Producer Jonathan Nolan on AI: ‘We’re in Such a Frothy Moment’ Jonathan Nolan saw this coming. As a screenwriter, he’s worked on several of his brother Christopher Nolan’s films, from Interstellar to the Dark Knight movies. Partnered with his wife Lisa Joy, he created HBO’s Westworld and executive produced Amazon Prime’s Fallout. But before that, he cut his TV teeth creating Person of Interest, a CBS procedural about a solitary tech billionaire who creates a piece of surveillance software aimed at stopping crime before it happens. It was fiction, but it’s hard not to feel its prescience. With Fallout, now in its second season, Nolan also has his sights on the future. Based on the video game series of the same name, it’s about a postapocalyptic America where everyone must survive in any way they can. It’s also wickedly funny and full of 1950s-era retrofuturism. So, what does Nolan see happening in the coming decades? A lot. For one, he doesn’t think AI is going to replace human filmmakers. In fact, he thinks it could help aspiring directors get a foot in the door. (Though, he says, he will never use it in his own writing.) He’d also like to see the demise of (most) social media—but understands that may never happen. For this week’s episode of The Big Interview podcast, I asked Nolan about all of those things and more. Below you’ll find his thoughts on writing Batman movies, classic cars, and what he’d actually bring to his own doomsday bunker. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. KATIE DRUMMOND: Jonathan Nolan, welcome to The Big Interview. JONATHAN NOLAN: Thank you for having me. I’m delighted to have you here in person in New York. It’s very cold. I’m from Canada so my barometer is a little off, but … I’m from Chicago. I tend to think of New York as wimpy cold. No, no, this is real. The older I get the weaker and more frail. So I can’t tolerate [it]. I've been in LA for 25 years. Completely useless. So we're both totally useless. It's going to be a great conversation. We always like to start these discussions with a little warmup. Actually, this might help today of all days. But this is just a warmup for your brain, some very fast questions. Are you ready? The reason I became a writer is because I was no good at answering fast questions. So I’m going to flub this. Oh good. This will be the whole hour. That's it. What is the most overused sci-fi trope? Ooh! Faster-than-light travel. Why? Because it's a sort of story convenience, and I guess we used it in Interstellar, but we use it in a slightly backhanded way, which is a wormhole. Which doesn't quite feel the same, but effectively it's the same thing. It's just a way to skip the boring bits. What's a book you go back to over and over? Of late, I go back to all of the Iain Banks Culture books. Years ago, I was looking for positive portrayals of AI in science fiction. Oh, interesting. We're going to talk about this. It was almost nothing, really nothing. It's kind of James Cameron on one side, and no one on the other side of the roster and Iain Banks, who wrote those books over the course of 20 years, starting in the late ’80s, I think, until his death in the early 2010s. Far too young. But they are the most fully realized and brilliant depiction of a hybrid civilization where you've got people and you've got AI and they have sort of figured it out. What is the weirdest app on your phone right now? The one that has captured the most of my attention—and it's disastrous—is an app called Bring a Trailer. What is that? It’s for buying classic cars. I'm from Chicago. I emigrated to the States when I was 11. When I got my driver's license, I became an American. I've never gone back. Always loved cars. You're a car guy. This did not come up in my research. So you're using an app to look at cars to potentially acquire. Classic old cars, those sorts of things. You know, I love electric cars. I've driven electric cars for years. They're fantastic. But it's very clear we're in this moment, like, I miss the Cretaceous cell phone age, when you had like a million different shapes. You had the ones that flipped and rolled and did all that stuff. Then the iPhone came along and then it's just this banal, incredibly functional [object]. You know, there is no diversity of shape or function. That's what's happening in cars. Like vanishingly quick. Like Trump is trying to hold on and, I mean, you look at China and the barn door's wide open. So you're looking for the eclectic, the diverse … … older, internal combustion cars with manual transmissions. Wow. OK. Well, that is a weird app. What's harder to write—a perfect ending or a perfect pilot? Perfect pilot. Perfect endings are more important. You ascribe value to them because if you don't have an ending, you don't have anything. But in truth, a beginning without an ending is like a joke without a punch line. I walked into JJ Abrams’ office one day, and we talked about movies for a while and I walked out as a showrunner, kind of. I liken the experience to getting my tie caught in a shredder. It was sort of like, “Oh, I’ll do a little bit of this …” Then, 15 or 16 years later, here I am. But writing pilots was a maddening experience. As a film writer, you look at all this cool stuff you have and you'll probably have to cut a few things out. With TV it’s like I have a hundred cool things and I’m going to show you four, and I have to pick the most strategically sound combination of those things. There’s no closure. It’s very difficult. If you had to be trapped in one digital simulation, which would you choose? Oh, wow. We like to have fun with these. You know, and we're both parents, but being able to access, honestly, these years right now, where your kids are still so close and they're relying on you for everything. But they're filled with fascinating insights and it's just, you know, that level of closeness and intimacy and it's just incredible. My brother's kids are older. I see how this goes. It's wonderful. It's wonderful the whole way through. But you never quite get this moment again. Well, don't make me cry. So you would want to live in a digital simulation of your reality with relatively young kids, who still love and adore you and think you're the best thing. Well, let’s not get carried away. I'm not sure if they love and adore me, but they tolerate me. You want to live in a digital simulation where your kids still tolerate you. Yes. I'll take it. That hits. I would, too. I would love to live in that world forever. Yeah. Ugh. For sure. Google Search or ChatGPT? Google Search for sure. Agree. Now, you wrote the short story that became the film Memento. Do you have any tattoos and what are they? My sister-in-law, Emma, and I, who produced that film, were talking during the production about getting tattoos. Then we chickened out. No, come on. If you don't get one when you're making that movie, you're never getting a tattoo, so … Never. I am a blank slate, as they say. What is the most Luddite part of your creative workflow? I wouldn't categorize it as Luddite, but we're still shooting everything on film. I mean, we can come back to this later, because it relates to the AI of it all, but the promise of digital cameras was that they would save enormous amounts of money. My contention is, and this relates to AI as well, there is no technology that I've ever been presented with, and I've been doing this for 25 years, that has made anything that we do for television cheaper, ever. If you plot the economics of film or television over the last 50 years, I would challenge anyone to point to the inflection point where digital cameras came in and democratized it. Because they never did. So we shoot it on film because it costs the same, and it looks better. Lastly, what is one must-have for your doomsday bunker? Nintendo Switch. And some games, I assume. Yeah, for sure. Do you have a doomsday bunker? If you have a doomsday bunker, I think it's like Fight Club: The first rule is you don't tell people you have a doomsday bunker. There's no bunker. Not yet. I'm a techno optimist. Let me ask you: When I was getting ready to meet you, I was looking back at your career and looking at Person of Interest. Reading about that really took me back. Interstellar. Fallout. There aren't many people, I would say, in film and TV who have so consistently approached tech and science and AI with the consistency and the breadth that you have. You have stuck with these themes. What keeps you coming back to those subjects? That’s a very flattering way of saying that I get a little stuck. Come on. It’s a big field. I wrote a film for my brother and David Hayman at Warner Bros. that never got made, that had enough overlap with Inception and then with Person of Interest. We never quite circled back to it. But it was about AI, it was about AI as a bad guy. And is this sort of early 2000s? 2005. And it didn't go, but I got fascinated by the subject. I did a lot of research; I did a lot of looking into it. The next hit for me was the robot characters in Interstellar. I went from one project to the next and I was like, “Wouldn't it be fun to write robots?” You know, the tension of the robot crew member, whether it's Alien or pretty much any version of this, is that they will eventually mutiny and murder everyone, and they have a secret agenda. But what if they didn't? What if they were just all of the virtues that we found the most beautiful, right? What if they were brave, self-sacrificing, sarcastic, and funny. Amazing leaders. What if they just embodied those values the whole way through? Maybe you'd give the audience a slight discomfort at first. Then this kind of interesting feeling of, “Oh, OK, that's one path.” Right? It's not written that the path has to be this sort of human form of xenophobia. I’d also gotten fascinated with this idea of what happens when you have this fire hose of data that's out there. What if something could pick through it and find patterns and find meaning. That proved to be very prescient, I must say. Actually, sorry, I missed a piece there. In The Dark Knight, there is a plot twist about mass surveillance. Bruce Wayne builds this ethically-challenged system of stealing information, doing echo location from everyone's cell phone and giving him the ability to map the city all at once. That was sort of wrestling with this idea of how much do we trust the people protecting us, with the government surveilling us, and what good could they put that to? So the idea of mass surveillance being organized into and filtered into something that could help people is something I've been fascinated with, and that is an origin point for AI, a natural one. When we were trying to put together Westworld, which is obviously where we got closest to this subject, Anthony Hopkins was interested. Then, as always happens, the studio and the agents kind of battled back and forth for a little bit too long and we started to get a sense that we were going to lose Tony on this one. So I wrote him a letter. The letter had a line, it was a thought that had occurred to me walking home one night, and it went like this: “We lived before, before.” What is a little harder to define, but you can feel it, you can feel this bump in the road, this inflection point. It's a really big one, and you feel it coming very quickly. You can't quite picture a big wave like Interstellar. You don't know what's on the far side of it, but you know it's coming. For me, that has been about this moment that we're now standing in the middle of. So, we started writing these films and watching what was happening in the series. And this is the story of our time. So the question for me would be like, “Why would you write about anything else, really?” When you think about writing that letter and of feeling like you were on the precipice of something that I think a lot of people had no idea they were on the precipice of, how do you feel standing in the middle of it, having been someone who years ago was pointing at it? What is that experience like for you? There's no trace of “I told you so,” because I didn't know what to say, and I still don't know. I think we're in the middle of that wave, but a lot of what's happening right now with salesmanship … a lot of what's happening right now is hype. We're dealing with that in our business. We were very scared, in film and television, about what was right around the corner. A lot of that was hype. We're two years into it, now we're up against the next contract negotiation and it's like, OK, well, how much fruit has that borne? How much does that really change what we do? I think when we actually sit down to use these tools and think about what these tools do, I'm almost completely riven between two totally opposing worldviews. One, that these tools are really just sort of a glorified browser search function with the right economic activity and brilliance being applied to them. I never imagined that consciousness. I don't believe that there's something specific or privileged about human consciousness. This is something, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about for Westworld. The flip side of that belief is that something as simple as an LLM could give rise to cognition on a level that becomes increasingly hard to distinguish from human cognition. At which point we are certainly in the middle of the thing that I was seeing. Because there've been so many false starts with AI over a hundred years. These moments where it’s like, “here it comes,” and everyone kind of braces for it, and we have a lot of conversations like this, and then a couple of years later it peters out a little bit. Right around when I started my job here at WIRED, so like two-and-a-half years ago, it was all of a sudden the only thing anyone could talk about. Of course a lot of that was genuinely fascinating advances in this research and in these tools. Then, to your point, it was marketing and hype and hyperbole. And commercialization. There’s a need for some of these companies to show a return on their investment. It's really hard to make sense of it. How do you educate yourself when this is all moving so quickly? It's tough. One of the ways, and it wasn't anything we set out to do, but because of the success of Westworld—HBO at the time was positioning itself as a tech company to try to get sold and compete with Netflix—so the first time we showed that pilot to any large group of people was an event that [former HBO CEO] Richard Plepler arranged with [investor] Yuri Milner at his enormous house in Mountain View. We showed the pilot and then did a Q&A afterwards. Sam Altman was the MC. He had all his Y Combinator folks there watching. So from the beginning we were picked up and tossed into that group of people; over the course of making that show we wound up becoming quite close with some of the people leading the charge here. So I was hearing stories 15 years ago about what was happening at DeepMind before Google acquired it. There's sort of a criteria for when to terminate an experiment, and that went straight into Westworld. And weirdly, [we] unintentionally had a front-row seat to a lot of what has transpired in the last 10 to 15 years. So staying close to it and listening to it. But even now, the pace, the pitch, the tenor of things is moving so quickly. We're in such a frothy moment. Which I immediately distrust … Yeah, I don't love froth. It usually means a bubble burst or a sleight of hand rather than [something] genuine. We're still invited to these conversations, these closed-door conversations with people who are leading the charge here. So you are still very close to that industry. You're getting a front-row seat. Yeah. Yeah. Must be very interesting. It is fascinating. I know these are closed-door meetings. I assume they're off the record. But has anything come out of them, even a notion or something that nudged you in a certain direction or changed the way you were thinking about the technology? A hundred percent. I think an observation that I started, and then was bounced back and forth with a friend who's leading one of the leading companies, was we'd spent a day working with this team talking about what you can do with these things. You know, where's it all going? What are the applications for it? Because I think that is one of the bigger questions. I think for the first time in a very long time, there may be moments like in the middle of the Second World War with so many technologies just kind of pouring out of the war effort. You know, the amount of brilliance over 40 years to get to this place, you don't want overnight success, right? The actor, singer, who finally gets the Oscar, Grammy, whatever, has been doing this for 20 years. These neural nets have been around for a very, very long time. Not an overnight success, but pretty much to your point, two-and-a half years ago, suddenly went from an obscure talking point for computer scientists to an everyday fact for all of our kids. Everyone. All over the place. It occurred to me that unlike some of these technologies over the years, the applications for which were slightly more clear, this is more like an alien spaceship crash-landed on the face of the planet. Each of these companies and all of us are exploring the ruins of it. We kind of walk into one room and we're like, “Oh shit, I can do teleportation.” Go to another room and it's like, “OK, I can make movies.” It's less like we're making these things and more like we're sort of stumbling upon them, because we've created something so powerful and so recursive that it can spew out, almost weekly or monthly, these wonders. I remember the first time I saw videos from Veo, the first launch where you kinda looked at it and you went, “Oh boy.” Because this is what I do for a living. And we spend an awful lot of money to build shots, with effects that look good. I have a lot of friends in the gaming space, I know how much money they're spending to do stuff. Then you've got a product that's like, oh, it's a $10 subscription and you can make this, this, this, the other thing. You know, it is this extraordinary moment where instead of thinking of an application and then chasing it down over the course years using a handful of advanced degrees, it's more like, here is this giant morass and, and you're going to dig around in it and you're going to pull out something from here and something from there. Beyond the hype, these technologies are genuinely transformative. There's no question about it. They're going to transform education and medicine, all the usual things that everyone talks about. They're going to transform culture. We haven't reckoned with the social consequences. Forget putting the genie back in the bottle. How do we convince the genie not to destroy whole segments of the economy? Who can tell the genie what to do and what not to do? I’m sure that’s top of mind in the context of your industry, but even more broadly than that. You’re a parent. You’re thinking about what this means for your kids in 20 years. Or next year. Exactly. It's scary, it's exciting. Certainly some of these products give you lots of good reasons to be cynical, but I've had a couple of conversations with people who were at the forefront of these things who really have a very clear and very compelling humanist perspective on this. They think about kids who are disadvantaged, who don't have access to the kinds of things that our kids may have access to. We saw this in a pandemic, right? We were able to take our kids and make a little school in the back of our house and hire a teacher. We just re-created what we could do. The idea that these tools could be, say, a tutor that never forgets a question they’ve asked you. That, while you’re sleeping, researches scholarships. That might be a perfect way to get these things, especially for kids who don’t have those advantages. It might really be leveling the playing field. These tools are largely free. So the paradox of this thing is you say, “Who has the keys to these things?” You know, I'm very—I am very concerned about that. One of the interesting comments that you made about AI, this was in an interview in Semafor last year, was about how you use it. They asked if you used AI to write and you said, “Oh god, no. That’s crossing the Rubicon.” Yeah. Do you see uses for it? Do you draw a hard line in the sand and just say “absolutely not.” Where do you see AI in terms of art and creativity? I guess there's one way to take that quote, which is that it is sort of a political thing. It's not at all; it's more superstitious, right? There are writers who love to write. There are writers who suffer through writing. I suffer through writing, I find writing exceptionally difficult. I love having written. There's nothing like the feeling of having written something and feeling that you got it. How does that look for you? A lot of sitting there and kind of bashing my head against the wall. A lot of pacing, a lot of chocolate, a lot of walks. And that's the problem, right? I used to smoke. When I was writing the first movie I ever got paid to write, which is The Prestige, I started out smoking as I had smoked through college. And I realized that if I finished that script and I was still smoking, I would never quit. Because if the script was good … I think many writers, if you're listening to this, you know exactly what he's talking about. I managed to quit cold turkey halfway through the script, so that I could never point to that script if it was a good script, if it worked, and think like, “I really gotta go back.” It would just pull you in every time. I think about AI the same way. That’s no assessment of its virtues. I just think if I let it into my creative process, which is already so fraught, that I would never find my way back. But it's terrific for research. Say you’re doing an adaptation or a reboot or something like that. You can get into it and you can ask questions. Like, “Tell me where in the book series such-and-such character first talked about their childhood.” It’s a way to speed through some of those harder aspects of corralling. So it has enormous use. There is a wonderful notion that we’re going to save money somehow. It’s never gotten cheaper. I was talking to [Fallout video game director] Todd Howard about this on the gaming side of things. Those games are just like big movies. They’ve just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. Nothing ever makes it cheaper. Digital cameras didn't make it cheaper. The digital postproduction process didn't make it cheaper. So you think the idea that artificial intelligence could wipe out a bunch of jobs and take costs down for film and TV production is nonstarter nonsense? It's entirely possible. There's this wonderful quote from The New Yorker a few months ago where it basically said that it’s about the gullibility of management of these companies if they think these tools can replace everyone. It’s because they’ve been overhyped, right? It managed to scare all of us during the strike. This is part of the reason the strike went on so long. If they made bad decisions, the consequences would be catastrophic. But assuming that people still want a certain number of big movies every year and a certain number of big shows every year, the applications for these tools … You know, there's been a lot of hand-wringing, a lot of arguments, a lot of conversations in my town. And God bless them, that technology companies will come down to sort of make nice. It's literally like the delegation from Northern California comes to visit with the Southern California delegation. I mean, they barely bother with the New York delegation of journalism anymore, so I’m glad to hear they’re still talking to you guys. Sometimes those meetings are somewhat contentious. Last time I was at one of those, someone sort of trotted out this metaphor that they were Uber drivers and we were taxi drivers. I said, “OK, maybe. But maybe you’re Uber and we’re Formula One drivers.” Oh, I like that. Not to sound self-aggrandizing. Oh, seize the power. Uber has no relevance to, you know, Ferrari. I'm a car guy, right? Maybe Uber helps the fans get to the race, but it's not the race, right? Those technologies have nothing to do with the race. What these technologies will do, and I think they're incredible in this, is give access to the next generation of filmmakers who don't even have it. There's a generation of filmmakers who would never have got to Hollywood. I hope that Hollywood will remain an important epicenter of culture creation and filmmaking, because these people will eventually get fed up with the prompt version of filmmaking and they'll come, as so many of us have done for a hundred years now, and try to convince someone to give them some money to hire a proper Hollywood crew and go make a real movie. I would point to Sean Baker, a terrific filmmaker. After he made Tangerine famously on an iPhone, the next year I was watching The Florida Project and I was taken aback. I was like, “I gotta reconsider my whole position on film, because this movie’s beautiful.” Then I got to the end and I Googled it and, of course, he shot it on 35 millimeter. He got there with an iPhone, and his last three films have been shot on film, because you use the tools that allow you to raise your hand and say, “Hey, look at me. Look at what I'm doing.” This is my fervent hope. Because film is ultimately a collaborative medium. That’s maybe the scariest part of these technologies, they’re not collaborative. The isolationist aspect. That’s like writing. Writing sucks. It does suck. Filmmaking's amazing because it's me and 800 of our friends. So it’s this idea of ,“Well, how did you get your big break?” “Oh, I made a film with AI and someone saw it.” I think that's awesome. As long as it doesn't replace [anyone] and as long as we don't go through this moment where people think, “Oh, we can do all this content for peanuts.” It's like, “Well, no, you've always had the ability to do that. It's called B movies.” B movies have always been there. And independent films, which is where I started. You've always been able to make the lower-cost version of it. But then there has always still been the AAA version of it. I sometimes describe my job as photographing beautiful people in beautiful places. And the people part is important. The fact that the actors are real people and it matters to audiences. I think that matters a lot. The culture of celebrity, the idea of that connection you have to them. Then I started working in television and the bond that people have with television actors is different and much deeper. This is a long-lost member of their family. You seem very sensitive about cost and the idea of spending less money to produce great work. You gave a speech at the Saturn Awards and said, quote, “As producers, we are not just here to save people money.” You were speaking in the context of bringing production back to California, which you did with the second season of Fallout. What do you think about the financial pressures of your industry? What kind of fight are you fighting to try to get the resources that you need to do the work you want to do? It's a great question, and it reminds me that there is one technology over the years that has radically altered the economics of film. I'm not sure if you'd say it's actually materially changed the trend line, but it definitely altered the economics and that technology is the tax rebate. That’s not a technology, but it is an innovation. As the recipient of funds from the great state of New York, the great state of California, the United Kingdom, Utah—everywhere we go, if there's a rebate, we'll try to take advantage of it. You know, you want to put as much money on the screen as you can. Part of the reason I was so worked up in that speech was not just that a fire had destroyed the homes of 10 of our crew members on Fallout and a dozen of our friends. It was that I had just started to get an idea from my crew. We have a terrific crew. A lot of them worked with us on Westworld, so we’ve worked with some of these folks for a decade or more. These are folks who are the best at what they do, and usually when we have a wrap party, not so many people can make it because they’re in such high demand. They’re already on to the next thing. For the second season of Fallout, everyone’s at the wrap party. I was like “Oh no, this is a problem.” They haven't been hired. There's no production. I mean, it's been a catastrophe, an absolute catastrophe. Also, the complicity of studios, and studio production heads and producers being willing to go along with, “Well, look, we could make this in California or New York, but we’re going to make it in Hungary because we'll be able to do it for $30 or $40 million less." I think that's been an incredibly shortsighted and foolish thing for us to do. The New York Times story where I found that quote, by the way, is actually about you bringing the second season of Fallout to California. You moved production back, and you were really vocal about pushing for the industry to do the same with more projects. Have you seen progress in that direction since that push? I think it's very easy to be cynical about state politics. But they were incredibly thoughtful and smart. In a year in which you have enormous challenges from the incoming Trump administration, enormous challenges for the state of California's budget, they cleared a much bigger incentive to try to make sure that California remained competitive. It's not big enough. It’s never big enough. Georgia essentially has an uncapped one. But it was a huge shot in the arm. These things move slowly. It's a really big cruise ship. It turns really slowly. It'll take a while to undo some of the damage, but I'm hopeful that what the state legislators and the governor was able to pass will give us the best shot for keeping Hollywood Hollywood for another hundred years. I have to ask you about Fallout. The show is, of course, based on a video game franchise that has many decades of history. The second season of the show premiered about a month ago, and new episodes are now coming out on Amazon every week. How do you describe the show to people who aren't familiar with the game, who maybe don't have the years of lore and history and maybe haven't watched it yet? I don't think I ever quite dialed in the elevator pitch, but it is along the lines of: What if the world ended but it didn't completely end? I started as a fan of the games … You've said you played, I think, Fallout 3 and it destroyed a year of your life, consumed a year of your life. It's the Annie Hall thing, right? There goes another novel. These games are incredible, and one of the things about the games that Todd makes—Todd Howard is the creative mastermind behind the latter-day Fallout games—is that they're essentially infinite, right? You can just play them and play them and play them and play them. One of the things they had, I thought, that was very unique about them—and this was a bit of a stretch for me as a filmmaker—was that they are this combination of darkness and violence and interesting questions about technology and identity, but they're also really weird and funny and gonzo and strange. Yes, they're about the end of the world. There are lots of stories about the end of the world. But these ones are weirdly optimistic. It feels like they're more about the beginning of a new world. They're more about, OK, well, culture would rebuild itself. Let's play in the mess that ensues. It's a retro-futuristic world. It resembles the 1950s, right? The music, the imagery, this focus on traditionalism. You didn't make that choice. It was inherent in the franchise, but why do you think it's set in that time period, which I think is not representative of the experience of all Americans. I think it was actually a very dark time. But there's this fixation on 1950s Americana as this perfect moment for the United States, at least in hindsight. How have you thought about that in working on the show? The sort of common lore is what defines the Fallout universe. Each of the games have different characters, they have a different setting, but they're all connected by this world, the world that was before. Look, you've seen a whole political movement built out of the nostalgia for that world, right? That world had a coherence and an appeal, even if it was rooted in all kinds of ugly, terrible shit. There was an unadulterated vision of America as the victor in the Second World War, and this force for good. Was it true? Well, in so many ways no, but in several important ways, yes. You know, they hadn't yoked the entire world under a Pax Americana; they hadn't taken over all these countries. They found maybe a sneakier way to do it. They pulled everyone into the Bretton Woods system. They pulled everyone into this kinda like free-to-play, free-trade system, which was powerful, and it created a world where you didn't have another world war for a very long time. American culture predominated and American culture had a lot of darkness in there, but largely spoke to values that I think a lot of us can get behind in terms of freedom and equity. And eventually, even if it was hypocrisy in the beginning, all these wonderful things that it's easy to be nostalgic about, and I think is therefore kind of ripe fruit. If you're going to think about America’s fall from grace, you'd probably fall from that moment. But if that moment is extended, that’s a fascinating thing. What if you extended that for a hundred years and you took the promise of nuclear technology seriously? I always thought that was such a lovely and incisive and satirical place to start. Was anything surprising to you about how the show has been received? When it's based on this franchise that has such a fandom and lore and such history—it's a lot of pressure. A lot of pressure. I sort of trained at the DC school of fan pressure with the three Batman movies that I worked on with my brother. I learned a lot of lessons there in terms of approaching something because you love it, not because you’re trying to figure out why someone else loves it. And you have to trust that hopefully you’re finding the right things in there. You're never going to please everyone. But if you come at it from a place of genuine respect and love, I think you'll probably do OK. There's going to be some people who are pissed off at you, and you just have to be OK with that. Just don't read the comments. Oh God, no. Yeah. I gave up on that a long, long time ago. I think when you talked to GQ, you said your disappointment with the internet over the last 20 years is “fucking bottomless.” So I had to assume that you were no longer reading Reddit threads about your show. No, sadly. Because I really love that community. I wanted to make sure to ask you a little bit about the politics of it all, which is to say that there are a lot of political themes that emerge in Fallout. We've talked about surveillance and the tools of the state. The apparatus. When you are working on a show and you're weaving these themes in, how do you make determinations about how overt and obvious to be as opposed to doing it in a more nuanced way? Look, fundamentally, philosophically for me, I do not feel qualified to tell anyone how to believe. I'm much more interested in poking and asking questions and saying, “Well, should we believe this? Should we question this?” Working on Batman, I made this analogy to a friend with regards to politics and engaging with it. Working on Batman felt like being a Yankee, right? You don’t play for the Yankees as a Democrat or a Republican, right? Taking a 60-year-old American icon and pressing that character into service for a specific, timely political point felt like a very fast path to losing relevance for the story. If you’re reading Dante's Inferno, it's stood the test of time, but it's kind of amazing how much regional politics is still laced into the first three chapters. He's still pissed off with his landlord in the third level of hell, right? Oh my God. It’s like, OK, come on, let's get onto the next part. So, for me, there was always a bit of responsibility to be asking questions, not giving answers. But I have strong political beliefs, and I think as the world has started to feel more incoherent, and making sense of things has become so hard to wade through, and it’s so hard to just talk to each other, it was really nice to work on a project like Fallout. From the very beginning, Graham Wagner, one of our showrunners, was joking that the first season, or the first game rather, could have been written by Adbusters. There's a strong point of view there, and it's a strong political point of view. Poking at things, this is the beauty of working in speculative fiction or in apocalyptic fiction. The world is gone, so we're not talking about this president, we're not talking about that. We're talking about a fictitious world a hundred years in the future, and 200 years after that, where everything has been blown to hell. But you get to pick up the bits, the detritus of our present political situation, potentially, and kind of look at it. That gives you that longer view, which I think allows you to engage. You know, I would challenge anyone to watch both seasons of Fallout and not find a group that doesn't come in for a drubbing. There's this slightly nativist progressivism of the Vault, where it’s like “freedom and safety for everyone, except we're not letting anyone in.” You know, it's kinda the lifeboat, progressivism. Then you have the wild libertarianism, if you want to call it anything, of the Wasteland. So we get to look at all these different things. Again, I don't have any answers, but it's really fun at this moment in time to be able to poke a little more aggressively at some of these things. I don't want to put too much on you, but we’re looking at this show that’s about the world after a collapse at the hands of very powerful conglomerates. So you're out there, you're talking about this show, you're working on the show, you're thinking about it all the time. You read the news. Is it hard for you, as someone who describes themselves as an optimist, not to see collapse everywhere? Yeah. It's kinda what we do, right? We look for the signs. I'm hopeful that we will pull ourselves back from the edge. We've managed to. I thought my brother's movie Oppenheimer ends brilliantly with that warning: It's not over yet. We haven't solved this problem yet. Yeah. We may still yet destroy the world. I think it's incredibly important for us to always remember that. That's why working on a show like Fallout, the timing sadly felt good as a gentle reminder that OK, it may be amusing to live in the wasteland that follows. I don't think any of us watch that show and wish to live in that world, or hope no one wishes to live in that world. But, I think with some thoughtfulness and a little compassion and maybe some slightly better heuristics for our social media, we might make it. We shall see. Before we end, I would love to play a very quick game. It's a game we came up with. It's called Control, Alt, Delete. So, what piece of technology would you love to control? What would you love to alt, so alter or change, and what would you love to delete? What would you vanquish from the Earth if given the opportunity? Got it. I would control AI generated video. All of it. Like I said, I'm so excited not necessarily for what we can do with it—I think it's limited for us—but what it can do for the next generation of filmmakers all over the world. I think it's going to be incredible. It's going to unleash a group of new voices. That's extraordinary. However, one of these conversations with the [tech] folks who come down occasionally and check in with us to let us know how the end of our world is going in very nice ways pointed out, “We watermark very carefully. Every piece of video we generate. But it's totally invisible and no one can see.” I said, “Probably the biggest social problem right now is that you need to make it extremely visible.” You go back to Blade Runner, and I always thought to myself, “God, it's so weird that they don't want the replicants to live on Earth. It was so tragic.” Now I totally understand. Like if you can make a video of the president saying whatever you want, and it's indistinguishable from reality, that has to be regulated yesterday. It will create absolute chaos. If we don't get a handle on that imminently, we're in very, very serious trouble. Well, we're going to hand it to you, so you'll solve that one. For alt, gene therapy. Crispr. Lisa and I are very engaged with someone very close to us in our lives who has a condition caused by a novel nonsense gene. There are thousands of these sorts of conditions, they can have devastating results. I think there's an assumption with everyone that once we got Crispr, we just Ctrl+V and away we go. Right? That's not how it's going to happen. You have these catastrophic diseases where the tool will be there, but the funding won't be there, the resources won't be there. The boring bit is just getting the business model right. Or abandoning the business model and saying, OK, is the government going to start funding some of these things? Um, delete. Social media. I would say all of it, but I have conversations with friends who have kids with special needs and this is their community. So maybe social media’s algorithmic feed. Gone. Dumpster fire. It’s like trans fats or ringtones. Trans fats, ringtones, and the algorithmic feed—Jonathan Nolan’s three agents of destruction. That’s it. I love it. Thank you so much. This was such a fascinating conversation. Likewise. How to Listen You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too. Comments You Might Also Like In your inbox: Upgrade your life with WIRED-tested gear A wave of unexplained bot traffic is sweeping the web Big Story: The women training for pregnancy like it’s a marathon Iran’s digital surveillance machine is almost complete Listen: Silicon Valley tech workers are trying to stop ICE © 2026 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices |
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אווירה עוינת, כסף מקטאר: מורה יהודייה תובעת את בית הספר של האו"ם בניו יורק נאדין סבאג, שלימדה 30 שנה ב-UNIS, טוענת לאנטישמיות גלויה, התעמרות מצד קולגה והנהלה שמטייחת תלונות בשל תלות בתרומות מקטאר. בתביעה מתוארים אירועים קשים בכיתות ובחדר המורים. בית הספר, שהמנהל שלו יהודי, דוחה את ההאשמות וטוען כי הן חסרות בסיס |
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Contents Cite This Page IMPORTANT NOTE: Most educators and professionals do not consider it appropriate to use tertiary sources such as encyclopedias as a sole source for any information—citing an encyclopedia as an important reference in footnotes or bibliographies may result in censure or a failing grade. Wikipedia articles should be used for background information, as a reference for correct terminology and search terms, and as a starting point for further research. As with any community-built reference, there is a possibility for error in Wikipedia's content—please check your facts against multiple sources and read our disclaimers for more information. Bibliographic details for "The New York Times" Please remember to check your manual of style, standards guide or instructor's guidelines for the exact syntax to suit your needs. For more detailed advice, see Citing Wikipedia. Citation styles for "The New York Times" Wikipedia contributors. (2026, February 14). The New York Times. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:55, February 21, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_New_York_Times&oldid=1338298435 Wikipedia contributors. "The New York Times." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 14 Feb. 2026. Web. 21 Feb. 2026. Wikipedia contributors, 'The New York Times', Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 14 February 2026, 08:45 UTC, <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_New_York_Times&oldid=1338298435> [accessed 21 February 2026] Wikipedia contributors, "The New York Times," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_New_York_Times&oldid=1338298435 (accessed February 21, 2026). Wikipedia contributors. The New York Times [Internet]. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; 2026 Feb 14, 08:45 UTC [cited 2026 Feb 21]. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_New_York_Times&oldid=1338298435. The New York Times, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_New_York_Times&oldid=1338298435 (last visited Feb. 21, 2026). Wikipedia contributors. The New York Times. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. February 14, 2026, 08:45 UTC. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_New_York_Times&oldid=1338298435. Accessed February 21, 2026. When using the LaTeX package url (\usepackage{url} somewhere in the preamble), which tends to give much more nicely formatted web addresses, the following may be preferred: |
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השימוש החדש לבית הולדתו של היטלר - והמחלוקת: "זו חרב פיפיות" הבית הישן בעיירה בראונאו-אם-אין שסמוכה לגבול גרמניה יהפוך לתחנת משטרה - במטרה למנוע מנאו-נאצים לעלות לרגל. "להראות בבירור שלא תתאפשר שם כל הנצחת נאצים", הסבירה הממשלה, אך בקרב התושבים המקומיים היו מי שהתנגדו: "בכל משטר, המשטרה מחויבת לעשות את שמורים לה". זה הרעיון החלופי |
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מימי יוון העתיקה - ועד המתקפה באיראן: כך האולימפיאדה עיכבה מלחמות לאורך השנים המשחקים היו חגיגה וגורם מאחד ביוון העתיקה, שידעה אז סכסוכים רבים, אך הקפידה על "שלום אולימפי" במהלכם. עד היום, בעולם מנסים לאמץ את המסורת ולהימנע מעימותים במקביל לתחרויות, אך לא תמיד זה מצליח. בינתיים, טראמפ שיגר איום נוסף: "לאיראן כדאי להגיע לעסקה. חלק מהמוחים נתלו בעזרת מנוף - והם שיחקו איתם" |
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Contents Fox News The Fox News Channel (FNC), often referred to as Fox News, is an American multinational conservative news and political commentary television channel and website based in New York City. Owned by the Fox News Media subsidiary of Fox Corporation, it is the most-watched cable news network in the United States, and as of 2023 it generates approximately 70% of its parent company's pre-tax profit. The channel broadcasts primarily from studios at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan. Fox News provides service to 86 countries and territories, with international broadcasts featuring Fox Extra segments during advertising breaks. The channel was created by Australian-born American media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 1996 to appeal to a conservative audience, hiring former Republican media consultant and CNBC executive Roger Ailes as its founding CEO. It launched on October 7, 1996 to 17 million cable subscribers. Fox News grew during the late 1990s and 2000s to become the dominant United States cable news subscription network. By September 2018, 87 million U.S. households (91% of television subscribers) could receive Fox News. In 2019, it was the top-rated cable network, averaging 2.5 million viewers in prime time. Murdoch, the executive chairman since 2016, said in 2023 that he would step down and hand responsibilities to his son, Lachlan. Suzanne Scott has been the CEO since 2018. It has been criticized for biased and false reporting in favor of the Republican Party, its politicians, and conservative causes, while portraying the Democratic Party in a negative light. Some researchers have argued that the channel is damaging to the integrity of news overall, and acts as the de facto broadcasting arm of the Republican Party. Since its formation, the channel has politically shifted further rightwards over time, and by 2016 became solidly pro-Trump. The channel has knowingly endorsed false conspiracy theories to promote Republican and conservative causes. These include, but are not limited to, false claims regarding fraud with Dominion voting machines during their reporting on the 2020 presidential election, climate change denial,[a] and COVID-19 misinformation. It has also been involved in multiple controversies, including accusations of permitting sexual harassment and racial discrimination by on-air hosts, executives, and employees, ultimately paying out millions of dollars in legal settlements. History In May 1985, Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch announced that he and American industrialist and philanthropist Marvin Davis intended to develop "a network of independent stations as a fourth marketing force" to directly compete with CBS, NBC, and ABC through the purchase of six television stations owned by Metromedia. In July 1985, 20th Century Fox announced Murdoch had completed his purchase of 50% of Fox Filmed Entertainment, the parent company of 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. Subsequently, and prior to founding FNC, Murdoch had gained experience in the 24-hour news business when News Corporation's BSkyB subsidiary began Europe's first 24-hour news channel (Sky News) in the United Kingdom in 1989. With the success of his efforts establishing Fox as a TV network in the United States, experience gained from Sky News and the turnaround of 20th Century Fox, Murdoch announced on January 30, 1996, that News Corp. would launch a 24-hour news channel on cable and satellite systems in the United States as part of a News Corp. "worldwide platform" for Fox programming: "The appetite for news – particularly news that explains to people how it affects them – is expanding enormously". In February 1996, after former U.S. Republican Party political strategist and NBC executive Roger Ailes left cable television channel America's Talking (now MSNBC), Murdoch asked him to start Fox News Channel. Ailes demanded five months of 14-hour workdays and several weeks of rehearsal shows before its launch on October 7, 1996. At its debut, 17 million households were able to watch FNC; however, it was absent from the largest U.S. media markets of New York City and Los Angeles. Rolling news coverage during the day consisted of 20-minute single-topic shows such as Fox on Crime or Fox on Politics, surrounded by news headlines. Interviews featured facts at the bottom of the screen about the topic or the guest. The flagship newscast at the time was The Schneider Report, with Mike Schneider's fast-paced delivery of the news. During the evening, Fox featured opinion shows: The O'Reilly Report (later The O'Reilly Factor), The Crier Report (hosted by Catherine Crier) and Hannity & Colmes. From the beginning, FNC has placed heavy emphasis on visual presentation. Graphics were designed to be colorful and gain attention; this helped the viewer to grasp the main points of what was being said, even if they could not hear the host (with on-screen text summarizing the position of the interviewer or speaker, and "bullet points" when a host was delivering commentary). Fox News also created the "Fox News Alert", which interrupted its regular programming when a breaking news story occurred. To accelerate its adoption by cable providers, Fox News paid systems up to $11 per subscriber to distribute the channel. This contrasted with the normal practice, in which cable operators paid stations carriage fees for programming. When Time Warner bought Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting System, a federal antitrust consent decree required Time Warner to carry a second all-news channel in addition to its own CNN on its cable systems. Time Warner selected MSNBC as the secondary news channel, not Fox News. Fox News claimed this violated an agreement (to carry Fox News). Citing its agreement to keep its U.S. headquarters and a large studio in New York City, News Corporation enlisted the help of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration to pressure Time Warner Cable (one of the city's two cable providers) to transmit Fox News on a city-owned channel. City officials threatened to take action affecting Time Warner's cable franchises in the city. In 2001, during the September 11 attacks, Fox News was the first news organization to run a news ticker on the bottom of the screen to keep up with the flow of information that day. The ticker has remained, and has proven popular with viewers. In January 2002, Fox News surpassed CNN in ratings for the first time. Accelerating in the 2000s, the role of conservative media and Fox News led to it being trusted by the Republican Party's base over that of traditional conservative elites, and partly led to Donald Trump's victory in the Republican primaries against the wishes of a very weak party establishment and traditional power brokers.: 27–28 Fox News subsequently became solidly pro-Trump, and cultivated deep ties between itself and the government. For his first term, nearly 20 current and former Fox News hosts received administrative and cabinet-level positions in his administration, and his second term also featured 23 current and former Fox News hosts appointed and nominated. In 2023, The Economist reported that Murdoch had "ditched a plan" to remerge News Corporation with Fox because it "faced resistance from News Corp investors unhappy at the prospect of being lumped together with Fox News, which they consider a toxic brand." Later that year, Murdoch said he would step down and that his son Lachlan would take over both Fox Corporation and News Corp, although the succession was disputed legally. In September 2025, Lachlan Murdoch secured control of Fox News, the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal in a $3.3 billion dollar deal as part of a renegotiated trust. The new trust and Lachlan's control was described as ensuring the channel's conservative slant until its expiration in 2050. Political alignment Fox News has been identified as practicing biased and false reporting in favor of the Republican Party, its politicians, and conservative causes, while portraying the Democratic Party in a negative light. Fox News has been characterized by critics, commentators, and researchers as an advocacy news organization[b] and as damaging to the integrity of news overall. It has been criticized for sharing propaganda.[c] The network is pro-Trump. During and after the 2020 presidential election, its primetime hosts promoted Trump and the Republican Party, and host Jeanine Pirro was in communication with the chair of the Republican National Committee. By 2017, a growing number of studies and academic literature found Fox's prime-time programming engaging in rhetorical and nonfactual themes similar to propaganda and not journalism or persuasion. Academic studies have argued that it has played a major role in boosting Republican turnout in American elections and that its role in American politics has been underestimated by political and communications scholars. Fox has been described as operating in an information silo where its audience views other media sources as "too liberal", and thus rely on Fox and no other forms of news media. Researchers and commentators have compared conservative Fox News as similar in purpose to liberal MSNBC, but that "the proportion of Fox News statements that are mostly false or worse is almost 50 percent higher than for MSNBC, and more than twice that of CNN". Its news coverage has gradually shifted further rightwards over time. Fox's most popular programs such as Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight do not make any claims to be accurate or fact-checked, and have little to no distinction between news and commentary. Media analyst Brian Stelter, who has written extensively about the network, observed in 2021 that in more recent years it had adjusted its programming to present "less news on the air and more opinions-about-the-news" throughout the day, on concerns it was losing viewers to more conservative competitors that were presenting such content. Outlets FNC maintains an archive of most of its programs. This archive also includes Movietone News series of newsreels from its now Disney-owned namesake movie studio, 20th Century Studios. Licensing for the Fox News archive is handled by ITN Source, the archiving division of ITN. FNC presents a variety of programming, with up to 15 hours of live broadcasting per day in addition to programming and content for the Fox Broadcasting Company. Most programs are broadcast from Fox News headquarters in New York City (at 1211 Avenue of the Americas), in its streetside studio on Sixth Avenue in the west wing of Rockefeller Center, sharing its headquarters with sister channel Fox Business Network. Fox News Channel has eight studios at its New York City headquarters that are used for its and Fox Business' programming: Studio B (used for Fox Business programming), Studio D (which has an area for studio audiences; no longer in current use), Studio E (used for Gutfeld! and The Journal Editorial Report), Studio F (used for The Story with Martha MacCallum, The Five, Fox Democracy 2020, Fox & Friends, Outnumbered, The Faulkner Focus, and Fox News Primetime), Studio G (which houses Fox Business shows, The Fox Report, Your World with Neil Cavuto, and Cavuto Live), Studio H (Fox News Deck used for breaking news coverage, no longer in current use), Studio J (used for America's Newsroom, Hannity, Fox News Live, Fox & Friends First, and Sunday Morning Futures) Starting in 2018, Thursday Night Football had its pregame show, Fox NFL Thursday, originating from Studio F. Another Fox Sports program, First Things First, also broadcasts from Studio E. Other such programs (such as Special Report with Bret Baier, The Ingraham Angle, Fox News @ Night, Media Buzz, and editions of Fox News Live not broadcast from the New York City studios) are broadcast from Fox News's Washington, D.C. studios, located on Capitol Hill across from Washington Union Station in a secured building shared by a number of other television networks, which includes NBC News and C-SPAN. The Next Revolution is broadcast from Fox News' Los Angeles bureau studio, which is also used for news updates coming from Los Angeles. Life, Liberty & Levin is done from Levin's personal studio in Virginia. Audio simulcasts of the channel are aired on SiriusXM Satellite Radio. In an October 11, 2009, in a New York Times article, Fox said its hard-news programming runs from "9 AM to 4 PM and 6 to 8 PM on weekdays". However, it makes no such claims for its other broadcasts, which primarily consist of editorial journalism and commentary. Fox News Channel began broadcasting in the 720p resolution format on May 1, 2008. This format is available on all major cable and satellite providers. Fox News Media produces Fox News Sunday, which airs on Fox Broadcasting and re-airs on the Fox News Channel. Fox News also produces occasional special event coverage that is broadcast on Fox Business. With the growth of the FNC, the company introduced a radio division, Fox News Radio, in 2003. Syndicated throughout the United States, the division provides short newscasts and talk radio programs featuring personalities from the television and radio divisions. In 2006, the company also introduced Fox News Talk, a satellite radio station featuring programs syndicated by (and featuring) Fox News personalities. Introduced in December 1995, the Fox News website features news articles and videos about national and international news. Content on the website is divided into politics, media, U.S., and business. Fox News' articles are based on the network's broadcasts, reports from Fox affiliates and articles produced by other news agencies, such as the Associated Press. Articles are usually accompanied by a video related to the article. Fox News Latino is the version aimed at a Hispanic audience, although presented almost entirely in English, with a Spanish section. According to NewsGuard, "Much of FoxNews.com's content, particularly articles produced by beat reporters and broadcasts produced by network correspondents, is accurate and well-sourced ... However, FoxNews.com has regularly advanced false and misleading claims on topics including the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Russo-Ukrainian War, COVID-19, and U.S. elections". In September 2008, FNC joined other channels in introducing a live streaming segment to its website: The Strategy Room, designed to appeal to older viewers. It airs weekdays from 9 AM to 5 PM and takes the form of an informal discussion, with running commentary on the news. Regular discussion programs include Business Hour, News With a View and God Talk. In March 2009, The Fox Nation was launched as a website intended to encourage readers to post articles commenting on the news. Fox News Mobile is the portion of the FNC website dedicated to streaming news clips formatted for video-enabled mobile phones. In 2018, Fox News announced that it would launch a subscription video on demand service known as Fox Nation. It serves as a companion service to FNC, carrying original and acquired talk, documentary, and reality programming designed to appeal to Fox News viewers. Some of its original programs feature Fox News personalities and contributors. Ratings and reception In 2003, Fox News saw a large ratings jump during the early stages of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At the height of the conflict, according to some reports, Fox News had as much as a 300% increase in viewership (averaging 3.3 million viewers daily). In 2004, Fox News' ratings for its broadcast of the Republican National Convention exceeded those of the three major broadcast networks. During President George W. Bush's address, Fox News attracted 7.3 million viewers nationally; NBC, ABC, and CBS had a viewership of 5.9 million, 5.1 million, and 5.0 million respectively. Between late 2005 and early 2006, Fox News saw a brief decline in ratings. One was in the second quarter of 2006, when it lost viewers for every prime-time program compared with the previous quarter. The audience for Special Report with Brit Hume, for example, dropped 19%. Several weeks later, in the wake of the 2006 North Korean missile test and the 2006 Lebanon War, Fox saw a surge in viewership and remained the top-rated cable news channel. Fox produced eight of the top ten most-watched nightly cable news shows, with The O'Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes finishing first and second respectively. FNC ranked No. 8 in viewership among all cable channels in 2006, and No. 7 in 2007. The channel ranked number one during the week of Barack Obama's election (November 3–9) in 2008, and reached the top spot again in January 2010 (during the week of the special Senate election in Massachusetts). Comparing Fox to its 24-hour-news-channel competitors in May 2010, the channel drew an average daily prime-time audience of 1.8 million viewers (versus 747,000 for MSNBC and 595,000 for CNN). In September 2009, the Pew Research Center published a report on the public view of national news organizations. In the report, 72% of polled Republican Fox viewers rated the channel as "favorable", while 43% of polled Democratic viewers and 55% of all polled viewers shared that opinion. However, Fox was given the highest "unfavorable" rating of all national outlets studied (25% of all polled viewers). The report went on to say that "partisan differences in views of Fox News have increased substantially since 2007". A January 2020 Pew Research Center study found that 43% of all American adults trusted Fox News, including 65% of Republicans and people who lean Republican, while 61% of Democrats and people who lean Democratic distrusted Fox News. A Public Policy Polling poll concluded in 2013 that positive perceptions of FNC had declined from 2010. 41% of polled voters said they trust it, down from 49% in 2010, while 46% said they distrust it, up from 37% in 2010. It was also called the "most trusted" network by 34% of those polled, more than had said the same of any other network. On the night of October 22, 2012, Fox set a record for its highest-rated telecast, with 11.5 million viewers for the third U.S. presidential debate. In prime time the week before, Fox averaged almost 3.7 million viewers with a total day average of 1.66 million viewers. In prime time and total day ratings for the week of April 15 to 21, 2013, Fox News, propelled by its coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, was the highest-ranked network on U.S. cable television, for the first time since August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the United States. January 2014 marked Fox News's 145th consecutive month as the highest-rated cable news channel. During that month, Fox News beat CNN and MSNBC combined in overall viewers in both prime time hours and the total day. In the third quarter of 2014, the network was the most-watched cable channel during prime time hours. During the final week of the campaign for the United States elections, 2014, Fox News had the highest ratings of any cable channel, news or otherwise. On election night itself, Fox News' coverage had higher ratings than that of any of the other five cable or network news sources among viewers between 25 and 54 years of age. The network hosted the first prime-time GOP candidates' forum of the 2016 campaign on August 6. The debate reached a record-breaking 24 million viewers, by far the largest audience for any cable news event. A 2017 study by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University found that Fox News was the third most-shared source among supporters of Donald Trump on Twitter during the 2016 presidential election, behind The Hill and Breitbart News. In 2018, Fox News was rated by Nielsen as America's most watched cable network, averaging a record 2.4 million viewers in prime time and total day during the period of January 1 to December 30, 2018. In an October 2018 Simmons Research survey of the trust in 38 news organizations, Fox News was ranked roughly in the center, with 44.7% of surveyed Americans saying they trusted it. The COVID-19 pandemic led to increased viewership for all cable news networks. For the first calendar quarter of 2020 (January 1 – March 31), Fox News had their highest-rated quarter in the network's history, with Nielsen showing a prime time average total audience of 3.387 million viewers. Sean Hannity's program, Hannity, weeknights at 9 pm ET was the top-rated show in cable news for the quarter averaging 4.2 million viewers, a figure that not only beat out all of its cable news competition but also placed it ahead of network competition in the same time slot. Fox ended the quarter with the top five shows in prime time, with Fox's Tucker Carlson Tonight finishing the quarter in second overall with an average audience of 4.2 million viewers, followed by The Five, The Ingraham Angle, and Special Report with Bret Baier. The Rachel Maddow Show was the highest non-Fox show on cable, coming in sixth place. Finishing the quarter in 22nd place was The Lead with Jake Tapper, CNN's highest rated show. According to a Fox News article on the subject, Fox & Friends averaged 1.8 million viewers, topping CNN's New Day and MSNBC's Morning Joe combined. The same Fox News article said that the Fox Business Network also had its highest-rated quarter in history and that Fox News finished March as the highest-rated network in cable for the 45th consecutive month. According to the Los Angeles Times on August 19, 2020: "Fox News Channel had six of last week's 11 highest-rated prime-time programs to finish first in the network ratings race for the third time since June" 2020. A Morning Consult survey the week after Election Day 2020 showed 30 percent of Republicans in the United States had an unfavorable opinion of Fox News, while 54 percent of Republicans viewed the network favorably, compared to 67 percent before the election. A McClatchy news story suggested criticism from Donald Trump as a major reason, as well as the network's early calling of Arizona for Joe Biden, and later joining other networks in declaring Biden the winner of the 2020 election. Ratings were also down for Fox News. Although it remained ahead of other networks overall, its morning show fell out of first place for the first time since 2001. Trump recommended OANN, which was gaining viewers. Newsmax was also increasing in popularity. Following a decline in ratings after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, in 2021, Fox News regained its lead in cable news ratings ahead of CNN and MSNBC. As indicated by a 2013 New York Times article, based on Nielsen statistics, Fox appears to have a mostly aged demographic. In March 2024, Fox was the most watched news network in total day and prime time viewers in primetime, with 2.135 million/1.306 million viewers respectively, compared to MSNBC with A25-54 demo, 1.307 million in primetime and 830,000 in day viewers, and CNN with 601,000 in primetime and 462,000 in day viewers. In the Adults age 25-54 category, Fox also leads with 246,000 in primetime and 158,000 in day viewers, followed by MSNBC with 133,000 viewers in primetime and 86,000 viewers in day, and CNN with 124,000 viewers in primetime and 85,000 in day viewers. According to the same Nielsen analysis, MSNBC is the second most watched news network. In 2008, in the 25–54 age group, Fox News had an average of 557,000 viewers, but dropped to 379,000 in 2013 while increasing its overall audience from 1.89 million in 2010 to 2.02 million in 2013. The median age of a prime-time viewer was 68 as of 2015[update]. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey showed that among those who named Fox News as their main source for political news, 69% are aged 50 or older. According to a 2013 Gallup poll, 94% of Fox viewers "either identify as or lean Republican". The 2019 Pew survey showed that among people who named Fox News as their main source for political and election news, 93% identify as Republicans. Among the top eight political news sources named by at least 2% of American adults, the results show Fox News and MSNBC as the two news channels with the most partisan audiences. Slogan Fox News Channel originally used the slogan "Fair and Balanced", which was coined by network co-founder Roger Ailes while the network was being established. The New York Times described the slogan as being a "blunt signal that Fox News planned to counteract what Mr. Ailes and many others viewed as a liberal bias ingrained in television coverage by establishment news networks". In a 2013 interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution, Rupert Murdoch defended the company's "Fair and Balanced" slogan, saying, "In fact, you'll find just as many Democrats as Republicans on and so on". In August 2003, Fox News sued comedian Al Franken over his use of the slogan as a subtitle for his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, which is critical of Fox News Channel. The lawsuit was dropped three days later, after Judge Denny Chin refused its request for an injunction. In his decision, Chin ruled the case was "wholly without merit, both factually and legally". He went on to suggest that Fox News' trademark on the phrase "fair and balanced" could be invalid. In December 2003, FNC won a legal battle concerning the slogan, when AlterNet filed a cancellation petition with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to have FNC's trademark rescinded as inaccurate. AlterNet included Robert Greenwald's documentary film Outfoxed (2004) as supporting evidence in its case. After losing early motions, AlterNet withdrew its petition; the USPTO dismissed the case. In 2008, FNC used the slogan "We Report, You Decide", referring to "You Decide 2008" (FNC's original slogan for its coverage of election issues). In August 2016, Fox News Channel began to quietly phase out the "Fair and Balanced" slogan in favor of "Most Watched, Most Trusted"; when these changes were reported in June 2017 by Gabriel Sherman (a writer who had written a biography on Ailes), a network executive said the change "has nothing to do with programming or editorial decisions". It was speculated by media outlets that Fox News Channel was wishing to distance itself from Ailes' tenure at the network. In March 2018, the network introduced a new ad campaign, Real News. Real Honest Opinion. The ad campaign is intended to promote the network's opinion-based programming and counter perceptions surrounding "fake news". In mid-November 2020, following the election, Fox News began to use the slogan "Standing Up For What's Right" to promote its primetime lineup. Content Fox News provided extensive coverage of the 2012 Benghazi attack, which host Sean Hannity described in December 2012 as "the story that the mainstream media ignores" and "obviously, a cover-up. And we will get to the bottom of it." Programming analysis by media watchdog Media Matters, which has declared a "War on Fox News", found that during the twenty months following the Benghazi attacks, FNC ran 1,098 segments on the issue, including: Over nearly four years after the Benghazi attack, there were ten official investigations, including six by Republican-controlled House committees. None of the investigations found any evidence of scandal, cover-up or lying by Obama administration officials. From 2015 into 2018, Fox News broadcast extensive coverage of an alleged scandal surrounding the sale of Uranium One to Russian interests, which host Sean Hannity characterized as "one of the biggest scandals in American history". According to Media Matters, the Fox News coverage extended throughout the programming day, with particular emphasis by Hannity. The network promoted an ultimately unfounded narrative asserting that, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton personally approved the Uranium One sale in exchange for $145 million in bribes paid to the Clinton Foundation. Donald Trump repeated these allegations as a candidate and as president. No evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton had been found after four years of allegations, an FBI investigation, and the 2017 appointment of a Federal attorney to evaluate the investigation. In November 2017, Fox News host Shepard Smith concisely debunked the alleged scandal, infuriating viewers who suggested he should work for CNN or MSNBC. Hannity later called Smith "clueless", while Smith stated: "I get it, that some of our opinion programming is there strictly to be entertaining. I get that. I don't work there. I wouldn't work there." Fox News has been described as conservative media, and as providing biased reporting in favor of conservative political positions, the Republican Party, and President Donald Trump. Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein described Fox News as an expanded part of the Republican Party. Political scientists Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins wrote that Fox News helped "Republicans communicate with their base and spread their ideas, and they have been effective in mobilizing voters to participate in midterm elections (as in 2010 and 2014)." Prior to 2000, Fox News lacked an ideological tilt, and had more Democrats watch the channel than Republicans. During the 2004 United States presidential election, Fox News was markedly more hostile in its coverage of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, and distinguished itself among cable news outlets for heavy coverage of the Swift Boat smear campaign against Kerry. During President Obama's first term in office, Fox News helped launch and amplify the Tea Party movement, a conservative movement within the Republican Party that organized protests against Obama and his policies. In the 2004 documentary Outfoxed, four people identified as former employees said that Fox News made them "slant the news in favor of conservatives". Fox News said that the film misrepresented the employment of these employees. During the Republican primaries, Fox News was perceived as trying to prevent Trump from clinching the nomination. Under Trump's presidency, Fox News remade itself into his image, as hardly any criticism of Trump could be heard on Fox News' prime-time shows. In Fox News' news reporting, the network dedicated far more coverage to Hillary Clinton-related stories, which critics argued was intended to deflect attention from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Trump provided significant access to Fox News during his presidency, giving 19 interviews to the channel while only 6 in total to other news channels by November 2017; The New York Times described Trump's Fox News interviews as "softball interviews" and some of the interviewers' interview styles as "fawning". In July 2018, The Economist has described the network's coverage of Trump's presidency as "reliably fawning". From 2015 to 2017, the Fox News prime-time lineup changed from being skeptical and questioning of Trump to a "Trump safe space, with a dose of Bannonist populism once considered on the fringe". The Fox News website has also become more extreme in its rhetoric since Trump's election; according to Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, the Fox News website has "gone a little Breitbart" over time. At the start of 2018, Fox News mostly ignored high-profile scandals in the Trump administration which received ample coverage in other national media outlets, such as White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter's resignation amid domestic abuse allegations, the downgrading of Jared Kushner's security clearance, and the existence of a non-disclosure agreement between Trump and the porn star Stormy Daniels. In March 2019, Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker that Fox News.com reporter Diana Falzone had the story of the Stormy Daniels–Donald Trump scandal before the 2016 election, but that Fox News executive Ken LaCorte told her: "Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert [Murdoch] wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go." The story was killed; LaCorte denied making the statement to Falzone, but conceded: "I was the person who made the call. I didn't run it upstairs to Roger Ailes or others. ... I didn't do it to protect Donald Trump." She added that "[Falzone] had put up a story that just wasn't anywhere close to being something I was comfortable publishing." Nik Richie, who claimed to be one of the sources for the story, called LaCorte's account "complete bullshit", adding that "Fox News was culpable. I voted for Trump, and I like Fox, but they did their own 'catch and kill' on the story to protect him." A 2008 study found Fox News gave disproportionate attention to polls suggesting low approval for President Bill Clinton. A 2009 study found Fox News was less likely to pick up stories that reflected well on Democrats, and more likely to pick up stories that reflected well on Republicans. A 2010 study comparing Fox News Channel's Special Report With Brit Hume and NBC's Nightly News coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during 2005 concluded "Fox News was much more sympathetic to the administration than NBC", suggesting "if scholars continue to find evidence of a partisan or ideological bias at FNC ... they should consider Fox as alternative, rather than mainstream, media". Research finds that Fox News increases Republican vote shares and makes Republican politicians more partisan. A 2007 study, using the introduction of Fox News into local markets (1996–2000) as an instrumental variable, found that in the 2000 presidential election "Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News", suggesting "Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure". These results were confirmed by a 2015 study. A 2014 study, using the same instrumental variable, found congressional "representatives become less supportive of President Clinton in districts where Fox News begins broadcasting than similar representatives in similar districts where Fox News was not broadcast." Another 2014 paper found Fox News viewing increased Republican vote shares among voters who identified as Republican or independent. A 2017 study, using channel positions as an instrumental variable, found "Fox News increases Republican vote shares by 0.3 points among viewers induced into watching 2.5 additional minutes per week by variation in position." This study used a different methodology for a later period and found an ever bigger effect and impact, leading Matthew Yglesias to write in the Political Communication academic journal that they "suggest that conventional wisdom may be greatly underestimating the significance of Fox as a factor in American politics." Fox News publicly denies it is biased, with Murdoch and Ailes saying to have included Murdoch's statement that Fox has "given room to both sides, whereas only one side had it before". In June 2009, Fox News host Chris Wallace said: "I think we are the counter-weight [to NBC News] ... they have a liberal agenda, and we tell the other side of the story." In 2004, Robert Greenwald's documentary film Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism argued Fox News had a conservative bias and featured clips from Fox News and internal memos from editorial vice president John Moody directing Fox News staff on how to report certain subjects. Fox News' most popular programs such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson do not make any claims to be accurate or fact-checked, and have little to no distinction between news and commentary. A leaked memo from Fox News vice president Bill Sammon to news staff at the height of the health care reform in the United States debate has been cited as an example of the pro-Republican bias of Fox News. His memo asked the staff to "use the term 'government-run health insurance,' or, when brevity is a concern, 'government option,' whenever possible". The memo was sent shortly after Republican pollster Frank Luntz advised Sean Hannity on his Fox show: "If you call it a public option, the American people are split. If you call it the government option, the public is overwhelmingly against it." Surveys suggest Fox News is widely perceived to be ideological. A 2009 Pew survey found Fox News is viewed as the most ideological channel in America, with 47 percent of those surveyed said Fox News is "mostly conservative", 14 percent said "mostly liberal" and 24 percent said "neither". In comparison, MSNBC had 36 percent identify it as "mostly liberal", 11 percent as "mostly conservative" and 27 percent as "neither". CNN had 37 percent describe it as "mostly liberal", 11 percent as "mostly conservative" and 33 percent as "neither". A 2004 Pew Research Center survey found FNC was cited (unprompted) by 69 percent of national journalists as a conservative news organization. A Rasmussen poll found 31 percent of Americans felt Fox News had a conservative bias, and 15 percent that it had a liberal bias. It found 36 percent believed Fox News delivers news with neither a conservative or liberal bias, compared with 37 percent who said NPR delivers news with no conservative or liberal bias and 32 percent who said the same of CNN. David Carr, media critic for The New York Times, praised the 2012 United States presidential election results coverage on Fox News for the network's response to Republican adviser and Fox News contributor Karl Rove challenging its call that Barack Obama would win Ohio and the election. Fox's prediction was correct. Carr wrote: "Over many months, Fox lulled its conservative base with agitprop: that President Obama was a clear failure, that a majority of Americans saw [Mitt] Romney as a good alternative in hard times, and that polls showing otherwise were politically motivated and not to be believed. But on Tuesday night, the people in charge of Fox News were confronted with a stark choice after it became clear that Mr. Romney had fallen short: was Fox, first and foremost, a place for advocacy or a place for news? In this moment, at least, Fox chose news." A May 2017 study conducted by Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy examined coverage of Trump's first 100 days in office by several major mainstream media outlets including Fox. It found Trump received 80% negative coverage from the overall media, and received the least negative coverage on Fox – 52% negative and 48% positive. On March 14, 2017, Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News commentator, claimed on Fox & Friends that British intelligence agency GCHQ had wiretapped Trump on behalf of Barack Obama during the 2016 United States presidential election. On March 16, 2017, White House spokesman Sean Spicer repeated the claim. When Trump was questioned about the claim at a news conference, he said "All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind who was the one responsible for saying that on television. I didn't make an opinion on it." On March 17, 2017, Shepard Smith, a Fox News anchor, admitted the network had no evidence that Trump was under surveillance. British officials said the White House was backing off the claim. Napolitano was later suspended by Fox News for making the claim. In June 2018, Fox News executives instructed producers to head off inappropriate remarks made on the shows aired by the network by hosts and commentators. The instructions came after a number of Fox News hosts and guests made incendiary comments about the Trump administration's policy of separating migrant children from their parents. Fox News host Laura Ingraham had likened the child detention centers that the children were in to "summer camps". Guest Corey Lewandowski mocked the story of a 10-year-old child with Down syndrome being separated from her mother; the Fox News host did not address Lewandowski's statement. Guest Ann Coulter falsely claimed that the separated children were "child actors"; the Fox News host did not challenge her claim. In a segment on Trump's alleged use of racial dog whistles, one Fox News contributor told an African-American whom he was debating: "You're out of your cotton-picking mind." According to the 2016 book Asymmetric Politics by political scientists Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, "Fox News tends to raise the profile of scandals and controversies involving Democrats that receive scant attention in other media, such as the relationship between Barack Obama and William Ayers ... Hillary Clinton's role in the fatal 2012 attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya; the gun-running scandal known as 'Fast and Furious'; the business practices of federal loan guarantee recipient Solyndra; the past activism of Obama White House operative Van Jones; the 2004 attacks on John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; the controversial sermons of Obama's Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright; the filming of undercover videos of supposed wrongdoing by the liberal activist group ACORN; and the 'war on Christmas' supposedly waged every December by secular, multicultural liberals." In October 2018, Fox News ran laudatory coverage of a meeting between Trump-supporting rapper Kanye West and President Trump in the Oval Office. Fox News had previously run negative coverage of rappers and their involvement with Democratic politicians and causes, such as when Fox News ran headlines describing conscious hip-hop artist Common as "vile" and a "cop-killer rapper", and when Fox News ran negative coverage of Kanye West before he became a Trump supporter. On November 4, 2018, Trump's website, DonaldJTrump.com, announced in a press release that Fox News host Sean Hannity would make a "special guest appearance" with Trump at a midterm campaign rally the following night in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The following morning, Hannity tweeted "To be clear, I will not be on stage campaigning with the President." Hannity appeared at the president's lectern on stage at the rally, immediately mocking the "fake news" at the back of the auditorium, Fox News reporters among them. Several Fox News employees expressed outrage at Hannity's actions, with one stating that "a new line was crossed". Hannity later asserted that his action was not pre-planned, and Fox News stated it "does not condone any talent participating in campaign events". Fox News host Jeanine Pirro also appeared on stage with Trump at the rally. The Trump press release was later removed from Trump's website. Fox News released a poll of registered voters, jointly conducted by two polling organizations, on June 16, 2019. The poll found some unfavorable results for Trump, including a record high 50% thought the Trump campaign had coordinated with the Russian government, and 50% thought he should be impeached – 43% saying he should also be removed from office – while 48% said they did not favor impeachment. The next morning on Fox & Friends First, host Heather Childers twice misrepresented the poll results, stating "a new Fox News poll shows most voters don't want impeachment" and "at least half of U.S. voters do not think President Trump should be impeached," while the on-screen display of the actual poll question was also incorrect. Later that morning on America's Newsroom, the on-screen display showed the correct poll question and results, but highlighted the 48% of respondents who opposed impeachment rather than the 50% who supported it (the latter being broken-out into two figures). As host Bill Hemmer drew guest Byron York's attention to the 48% opposed figure, they did not discuss the 50% support figure, while the on-screen chyron read: "Fox News Poll: 43% Support Trump's Impeachment and Removal, 48% Oppose." Later that day, Trump tweeted: "@FoxNews Polls are always bad for me...Something weird going on at Fox." In April 2017, it became known that former Obama administration national security advisor Susan Rice sought the unmasking of Trump associates who were unidentified in intelligence reports, notably Trump's incoming national security advisor Michael Flynn, during the presidential transition. In May 2020, acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist, declassified a list of Obama administration officials who had also requested unmasking of Trump associates, which was subsequently publicly released by Republican senators. That month, attorney general Bill Barr appointed federal prosecutor John Bash to examine the unmaskings. Fox News primetime hosts declared the unmaskings a "domestic spying operation" for which the Obama administration was "exposed" in the "biggest abuse of power" in American history. The Bash inquiry closed months later with no findings of substantive wrongdoing. However, certain Fox personalities have not had as much of a favorable reception from Trump: news anchors Shepard Smith (who retired from Fox in 2019) and Chris Wallace have been criticized by Trump for allegedly being adversarial, alongside Fox analyst Andrew Napolitano, who said Trump's actions in the Trump–Ukraine scandal were "both criminal and impeachable behavior". Trump was also critical of the network hiring former DNC chair Donna Brazile, in 2019. The relationship between Trump and Fox News, as well as other Rupert Murdoch-controlled outlets, soured following the 2020 United States presidential election, as Trump refused to concede that Joe Biden had been elected President-elect. This negative tonal shift led to increased viewership of Newsmax and One America News among Trump and his supporters due to their increased antipathy towards Fox; and as a result, Fox released promotional videos of their opinion hosts disputing the election results, promoting a Trump-affiliated conspiracy theory about voter fraud. By one measure, Newsmax saw a 497% spike in viewership, while Fox News saw a 38% decline. Writing for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in February 2021, senior media writer Tom Jones argued that the primary distinction between Fox News and MSNBC is not right bias vs. left bias, but rather that much of the content on Fox News, especially during its primetime programs, "is not based in truth". The Tampa Bay Times reported in August 2021 that it had reviewed four months of emails indicating Fox News producers had coordinated with aides of Florida governor Ron DeSantis to promote his political prospects by inviting him for frequent network appearances, exchanging talking points and, in one case, helping him to stage an exclusive news event. In February 2024, Alan Rosenblatt of Johns Hopkins University said that Fox News "is an entertainment company that has a news division, not a news company", adding that it "not only does not provide that distinction, it goes out of its way to make it difficult to see the difference. They make their opinion programs look like news programs, and they incorporate enough opinion content on their news programs to further that deception." In early 2024, Fox News host Jesse Watters promoted a conspiracy theory involving Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, and the Democratic Party in hopes of influencing voters ahead of the U.S. presidential primary season. Fox News has published headlines accusing the English Wikipedia of having a left-wing and socialist bias. On October 30, 2017, when special counsel Robert Mueller indicted Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and revealed George Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty (all of whom were involved in the Trump 2016 campaign), this was the focus of most media's coverage, except Fox News'. Hosts and guests on Fox News called for Mueller to be fired. Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson focused their shows on unsubstantiated allegations that Clinton sold uranium to Russia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation and on the Clinton campaign's role in funding the Steele dossier. Hannity asserted: "The very thing they are accusing President Trump of doing, they did it themselves." During the segment, Hannity mistakenly referred to Clinton as President Clinton. Fox News dedicated extensive coverage to the uranium story, which Democrats said was an attempt to distract from Mueller's intensifying investigation. CNN described the coverage as "a tour de force in deflection and dismissal". On October 31, CNN reported Fox News employees were dissatisfied with their outlet's coverage of the Russia investigation, with employees calling it an "embarrassment", "laughable", and saying it "does the viewer a huge disservice and further divides the country" and that it is "another blow to journalists at Fox who come in every day wanting to cover the news in a fair and objective way". When the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election intensified in October 2017, the focus of Fox News coverage turned "what they see as the scandal and wrongdoing of President Trump's political opponents. In reports like these, Bill and Hillary Clinton are prominent and recurring characters because they are considered the real conspirators working with the Russians to undermine American democracy." Paul Waldman of The Washington Post described the coverage as "No puppet. You're the puppet", saying it was a "careful, coordinated, and comprehensive strategy" to distract from Mueller's investigation. German Lopes of Vox said Fox News' coverage has reached "levels of self-parody" as it dedicated coverage to low-key stories, such as a controversial Newsweek op-ed and hamburger emojis, while other networks had wall-to-wall coverage of Mueller's indictments. A FiveThirtyEight analysis of Russia-related media coverage in cable news found most mentions of Russia on Fox News were spoken in close proximity to "uranium" and "dossier". On November 1, 2017, Vox analyzed the transcripts of Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, and found Fox News "was unable to talk about the Mueller investigation without bringing up Hillary Clinton", "talked significantly less about George Papadopoulos—the Trump campaign adviser whose plea deal with Mueller provides the most explicit evidence thus far that the campaign knew of the Russian government's efforts to help Trump—than its competitors", and "repeatedly called Mueller's credibility into question". In December 2017, Fox News escalated its attacks on the Mueller investigation, with hosts and guest commentators suggesting the investigation amounted to a coup. Guest co-host Kevin Jackson referred to a right-wing conspiracy theory claiming Strzok's messages are evidence of a plot by FBI agents to assassinate Trump, a claim which the other Fox co-hosts quickly said is not supported by any credible evidence. Fox News host Jeanine Pirro called the Mueller investigation team a "criminal cabal" and said the team ought to be arrested. Other Fox News figures referred to the investigation as "corrupt", "crooked", and "illegitimate", and likened the FBI to the KGB, the Soviet-era spy organization that routinely tortured and summarily executed people. Political scientists and scholars of coups described the Fox News rhetoric as scary and dangerous. Experts on coups rejected that the Mueller investigation amounted to a coup; rather, the Fox News rhetoric was dangerous to democracy and mirrored the kind of rhetoric that occurs before purges. A number of observers argued the Fox News rhetoric was intended to discredit the Mueller investigation and sway President Donald Trump to fire Mueller. In August 2018, Fox News was criticized for giving more prominent coverage of a murder committed by an undocumented immigrant than the convictions of Donald Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and his long-term personal attorney, Michael Cohen. At the same time, most other national mainstream media gave wall-to-wall coverage of the convictions. Fox News hosts Dana Perrino and Jason Chaffetz argued that voters care far more about the murder than the convictions of the President's former top aides, and hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity downplayed the convictions. In November 2017, following the 2017 New York City truck attack wherein a terrorist shouted "Allahu Akbar", Fox News distorted a statement by Jake Tapper to make it appear as if he had said "Allahu Akbar" can be used under the most "beautiful circumstances". Fox News omitted that Tapper had said the use of "Allahu Akbar" in the terrorist attack was not one of these beautiful circumstances. A headline on FoxNews.com was preceded by a tag reading "OUTRAGEOUS". The Fox News Twitter account distorted the statement further, saying "Jake Tapper Says 'Allahu Akbar' Is 'Beautiful' Right After NYC Terror Attack" in a tweet that was later deleted. Tapper chastised Fox News for choosing to "deliberately lie" and said "there was a time when one could tell the difference between Fox and the nutjobs at Infowars. It's getting tougher and tougher. Lies are lies." In 2009, Tapper had come to the defense of Fox News while he was a White House correspondent for ABC News, after the Obama administration claimed that the network was not a legitimate news organization. Fox News guest host Jason Chaffetz apologized to Tapper for misrepresenting his statement. After Fox News had deleted the tweet, Sean Hannity repeated the misrepresentation and called Tapper "liberal fake news CNN's fake Jake Tapper" and mocked his ratings. In July 2017, a report by Fox & Friends falsely said The New York Times had disclosed intelligence in one of its stories and that this intelligence disclosure helped Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, to evade capture. The report cited an inaccurate assertion by Gen. Tony Thomas, the head of the United States Special Operations Command, that a major newspaper had disclosed the intelligence. Fox News said it was The New York Times, repeatedly running the chyron "NYT Foils U.S. Attempt To Take Out Al-Bahgdadi". Pete Hegseth, one of the show's hosts, criticized the "failing New York Times". President Donald Trump tweeted about the Fox & Friends report shortly after it first aired, saying "The Failing New York Times foiled U.S. attempt to kill the single most wanted terrorist, Al-Baghdadi. Their sick agenda over National Security." Fox News later updated the story, but without apologizing to The New York Times or responding directly to the inaccuracies. In a Washington Post column, Erik Wemple said Chris Wallace had covered The New York Times story himself on Fox News Sunday, adding: "Here's another case of the differing standards between Fox News's opinion operation", which has given "a state-run vibe on all matters related to Trump", compared to Fox News's news operation, which has provided "mostly sane coverage". Fox News has often been described as a major platform for climate change denial.[a] A 2011 study by Lauren Feldman and Anthony Leiserowitz found Fox News "takes a more dismissive tone toward climate change than CNN and MSNBC". A 2008 study found Fox News emphasized the scientific uncertainty of climate change more than CNN, was less likely to say climate change was real, and more likely to interview climate change skeptics. Leaked emails showed that in 2009 Bill Sammon, the Fox News Washington managing editor, instructed Fox News journalists to dispute the scientific consensus on climate change and "refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question." According to climate scientist Michael E. Mann, Fox News "has constructed an alternative universe where the laws of physics no longer apply, where the greenhouse effect is a myth, and where climate change is a hoax, the product of a massive conspiracy among scientists, who somehow have gotten the polar bears, glaciers, sea levels, superstorms, and megadroughts to play along." According to James Lawrence Powell's 2011 study of the climate science denial movement, Fox News provides "the deniers with a platform to say whatever they like without fear of contradiction." Fox News employs Steve Milloy, a prominent climate change denier with close financial and organizational ties to oil companies, as a contributor. In his columns about climate change for FoxNews.com, Fox News has failed to disclose his substantial funding from oil companies. In 2011, the hosts of Fox & Friends described climate change as "unproven science", a "disputed fact", and criticized the Department of Education for working together with the children's network Nickelodeon to teach children about climate change. In 2001, Sean Hannity described the scientific consensus on climate change as "phony science from the left". In 2004, he falsely alleged that "scientists still can't agree on whether the global warming is scientific fact or fiction". In 2010, Hannity said the so-called "Climategate" – the leaking of e-mails by climate scientist that climate change skeptics claimed demonstrated scientific misconduct but which all subsequent enquiries have found no evidence of misconduct or wrongdoing – a "scandal" that "exposed global warming as a myth cooked up by alarmists". Hannity frequently invites contrarian fringe scientists and critics of climate change to his shows. In 2019, a widely shared Fox News news report falsely claimed that new climate science research showed that the Earth might be heading to a new Ice Age; the author of the study that Fox News cited said that Fox News "utterly misrepresents our research" and the study did not in any way suggest that Earth was heading to an Ice Age. Fox News later corrected the story. Shepard Smith drew attention for being one of few voices formerly on Fox News to forcefully state that climate change is real, that human activities are a primary contributor to it and that there is a scientific consensus on the issue. His acceptance of the scientific consensus on climate change drew criticism from Fox News viewers and conservatives. Smith left Fox News in October 2019. In a 2021 interview with Christiane Amanpour on her eponymous show on CNN, he stated that his presence on Fox had become "untenable" due to the "falsehoods" and "lies" intentionally spread on the network's opinion shows. On May 16, 2017, a day when other news organizations were extensively covering Donald Trump's revelation of classified information to Russia, Fox News ran a lead story about a private investigator's uncorroborated claims about the murder of Seth Rich, a DNC staffer. The private investigator said he had uncovered evidence that Rich was in contact with WikiLeaks and law enforcement were covering it up. The killing of Rich has given rise to conspiracy theories in right-wing circles that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party had Seth Rich killed allegedly because he was the source of the DNC leaks. U.S. intelligence agencies determined Russia was the source of the leaks. In reporting the investigator's claims, the Fox News report reignited right-wing conspiracy theories about the killing. The Fox News story fell apart within hours. Other news organizations quickly revealed the investigator was a Donald Trump supporter and had according to NBC News "developed a reputation for making outlandish claims, such as one appearance on Fox News in 2007 in which he warned that underground networks of pink pistol-toting lesbian gangs were raping young women." The family of Seth Rich, the Washington D.C. police department, the Washington D.C. mayor's office, the FBI, and law enforcement sources familiar with the case rebuked the investigator's claims. Rich's relatives said: "We are a family who is committed to facts, not fake evidence that surfaces every few months to fill the void and distract law enforcement and the general public from finding Seth's murderers." The spokesperson for the family criticized Fox News for its reporting, alleging the outlet was motivated by a desire to deflect attention from the Trump-Russia story: "I think there's a very special place in hell for people that would use the memory of a murder victim in order to pursue a political agenda." The family has called for retractions and apologies from Fox News for the inaccurate reporting. Over the course of the day, Fox News altered the contents of the story and the headline, but did not issue corrections. When CNN contacted the private investigator later that day, the investigator said he had no evidence that Rich had contacted WikiLeaks. The investigator claimed he only learned about the possible existence of the evidence from a Fox News reporter. Fox News did not respond to inquiries by CNN, and the Washington Post. Fox News later on May 23, seven days after the story was published, retracted its original report, saying the original report did not meet its standards. Nicole Hemmer, then assistant professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, wrote that the promotion of the conspiracy theory demonstrated how Fox News was "remaking itself in the image of fringe media in the age of Trump, blurring the lines between real and fake news." Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations said while intent behind Fox News, as a counterweight to the liberal media was laudable, the culmination of those efforts have been to create an alternative news source that promotes hoaxes and myths, of which the promotion of the Seth Rich conspiracy is an example. Fox News was also criticized by conservative outlets, such as The Weekly Standard, National Review, and conservative columnists, such as Jennifer Rubin, Michael Gerson, and John Podhoretz. Rich's parents, Joel and Mary Rich, sued Fox News for the emotional distress it had caused them by its false reporting. In 2020, Fox News settled with Rich family, making a payment that was not officially disclosed but which was reported to be in the seven figures. Although the settlement had been agreed to earlier in the year, Fox News arranged to delay the public announcement until after the 2020 presidential election. Fox News hosts and contributors defended Trump's remarks that "many sides" were to blame for violence at a gathering of hundreds of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia. Some criticized Trump. In a press conference on August 15, Trump used the term "alt-left" to describe counterprotesters at the white supremacist rally, a term which had been used in Fox News' coverage of the white supremacist rally. Several of Trump's comments at the press conference mirrored those appearing earlier on Fox News. According to Dylan Byers of CNN, Fox News' coverage on the day of the press conference "was heavy with "whataboutism". The average Fox viewer was likely left with the impression that the media's criticism of Trump and leftist protestors' toppling of some Confederate statues were far greater threats to America than white supremacism or the president's apparent defense of bigotry." Byers wrote "it showed that if Fox News has a line when it comes to Trump's presidency, it was not crossed on Tuesday." During Glenn Beck's tenure at Fox News, he became one of the most high-profile proponents of conspiracy theories about George Soros, a Jewish Hungarian-American businessman and philanthropist known for his donations to American liberal political causes. Beck regularly described Soros as a "puppet-master" and used common anti-Semitic tropes to describe Soros and his activities. In a 2010 three-part series, Beck depicted George Soros as a cartoonish villain trying to "form a shadow government, using humanitarian aid as a cover", and that Soros wanted a one-world government. Beck promoted the false and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Soros was a Nazi collaborator as a 14-year-old in Nazi-occupied Hungary. Beck also characterized Soros's mother as a "wildly anti-Semitic" Nazi collaborator. According to The Washington Post: "Beck's series was largely considered obscene and delusional, if not outright anti-Semitic", but Beck's conspiracy theory became common on the right-wing of American politics. Amid criticism of Beck's false smears, Fox News defended Beck, stating "information regarding Mr. Soros's experiences growing up were taken directly from his writings and from interviews given by him to the media, and no negative opinion was offered as to his actions as a child." Roger Ailes, then-head of Fox News, dismissed criticism levied at Beck by hundreds of rabbis, saying that they were "left-wing rabbis who basically don't think that anybody can ever use the word, Holocaust, on the air." During the first few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, Fox News was considerably more likely than other mainstream news outlets to promote misinformation about COVID-19. The network promoted the narrative that the emergency response to the pandemic was politically motivated or otherwise unwarranted, with Sean Hannity explicitly calling it a "hoax" (he later denied doing so) and other hosts downplaying it. This coverage was consistent with the messaging of Trump at the time. Only in mid March did the network change the tone of its coverage, after President Trump declared a national emergency. At the same time that Fox News commentators downplayed the threat of the virus in public, Fox's management and the Murdoch family took a broad range of internal measures to protect themselves and their employees against it. Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, two of Fox News's primetime hosts, promoted use of the drug hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19, an off-label usage which at the time was supported only by anecdotal evidence, after it was touted by Trump as a possible cure. Fox News promoted a conspiracy theory that coronavirus death toll numbers were inflated with people who would have died anyway from preexisting conditions. This was disputed by White House coronavirus task force members Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, with Fauci describing conspiracy theories as "nothing but distractions" during public health crises. Later in the pandemic, Hannity, Ingraham and Carlson promoted the use of livestock dewormer ivermectin as a possible COVID-19 treatment. Studies have linked trust in Fox News, as well as viewership of Fox News, with fewer preventive behaviors and more risky behaviors related to COVID-19. Once a COVID-19 vaccine became widely available, Fox News consistently questioned the efficacy and safety of the vaccine, celebrated evidence-free skepticism, and blasted attempts to promote vaccinations. More than 90% of Fox Corporation's full-time employees had been fully vaccinated by September 2021. After Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro promoted baseless allegations on her program that voting machine company Smartmatic and its competitor Dominion Voting Systems had conspired to rig the election against Trump. Hosts Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo also promoted the allegations on their programs on sister network Fox Business. In December 2020, Smartmatic sent a letter to Fox News demanding retractions and threatening legal action, specifying that retractions "must be published on multiple occasions" so as to "match the attention and audience targeted with the original defamatory publications." Days later, each of the three programs aired the same three-minute video segment consisting of an interview with an election technology expert who refuted the allegations promoted by the hosts, responding to questions from an unseen and unidentified man. None of the three hosts personally issued retractions. Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion defamation suit against the network, the three hosts, Powell and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani in February 2021. In an April 2021 court brief seeking dismissal of the suit, Fox attorney Paul Clement argued that the network was simply "reporting allegations made by a sitting President and his lawyers." A New York State Supreme Court judge ruled in March 2022 that the suit could proceed, though he dismissed allegations against Sidney Powell and Pirro, and some claims against Giuliani. The judge allowed allegations against Bartiromo and Dobbs to stand. The New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division unanimously rejected a Fox News bid to dismiss the Smartmatic suit in February 2023. The court reinstated defamation allegations against Giuliani and Pirro. In December 2020, Dominion Voting Systems sent a similar letter demanding retractions to Trump attorney Sidney Powell, who had promoted the allegations on Fox programs. On March 26, 2021, Dominion filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, alleging that Fox and some of its pundits spread conspiracy theories about Dominion, and allowed guests to make false statements about the company. On May 18, 2021, Fox News filed a motion to dismiss the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, asserting a First Amendment right "to inform the public about newsworthy allegations of paramount public concern." The motion to dismiss was denied on December 16, 2021, by a Delaware Superior Court judge. In addition to Bartiromo, Dobbs, and Pirro, the suit also names primetime hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. Venezuelan businessman Majed Khalil sued Fox, Dobbs and Powell for $250 million in December 2021, alleging they had falsely implicated him in rigging Dominion and Smartmatic machines. Dobbs and Fox News reached a confidential settlement with Khalil in April 2023. Fox News was the only major network or cable news outlet to not carry the first televised prime time hearing of the January 6 committee live; its regular programming of Tucker Carlson Tonight and Hannity was aired without commercial breaks. During the weeks following the election, Carlson and Hannity often amplified Trump's election falsehoods on their programs; previously disclosed text messages between Hannity and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany were presented during the hearing. Hannity told his audience, "Unlike this committee and their cheerleaders in the media mob, we will actually be telling you the truth," while Carlson said, "This is the only hour on an American news channel that won't be covering their propaganda live. They are lying and we are not going to help them do it." In June 2022, a Delaware Superior Court judge again declined to dismiss the Dominion suit against Fox News, and also allowed Dominion to sue the network's corporate parent, Fox Corporation. The judge ruled that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch may have acted with actual malice because there was a reasonable inference they "either knew Dominion had not manipulated the election or at least recklessly disregarded the truth when they allegedly caused Fox News to propagate its claims about Dominion." He noted a report that Rupert Murdoch spoke with Trump a few days after the election and informed him that he had lost. The New York Times reported in December 2022 that Dominion had acquired communications between Fox News executives and hosts, and between a Fox Corporation employee and the Trump White House, showing they knew that what the network was reporting was untrue. Dominion attorneys said hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, and Fox executives, attested to this in sworn depositions. In November 2020, Hannity hosted Sidney Powell, who asserted Dominion machines had been rigged, but said in his deposition, "I did not believe it for one second." A February 2023 Dominion court filing showed Fox News primetime hosts messaging each other to insult and mock Trump advisers, indicating the hosts knew the allegations made by Powell and Giuliani were false. Rupert Murdoch messaged that Trump's voter fraud claims were "really crazy stuff," telling Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott that it was "terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear." As a January 2021 Georgia runoff election approached that would determine party control of the U.S. Senate, Murdoch told Scott, "Trump will concede eventually and we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can." After the 2016 election, the network developed a cutting-edge system to call elections, which proved very successful during the 2018 midterm elections. The network was the first to call the 2020 Arizona race for Biden, angering many viewers. Washington managing editor Bill Sammon supervised the network's Decision Desk that made the call. Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the network's main news anchors, suggested during a high-level conference call that relying solely on data to make the call was inadequate and that viewer reaction should also be considered; MacCallum said, "in a Trump environment, the game is just very, very different." Sammon stood by the 2020 call and was fired by the network after the January 2021 Georgia runoff. In 2023, Rupert Murdoch was deposed and testified that some Fox News commentators were endorsing election fraud claims they knew were false. In February 2023, Fox's internal communications were released, showing that its presenters and senior executives privately doubted Donald Trump's claims of a stolen election. Chairman Rupert Murdoch once described Trump's voter fraud claims as "really crazy stuff", and also said that Trump advisers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell's television appearances were "terrible stuff damaging everybody". One November 2020 exchange showed Tucker Carlson accusing Powell of "lying ... I caught her. It's insane", with Laura Ingraham responding that "Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy". In another exchange that month, Carlson called for Fox journalist Jacqui Heinrich to be "fired" because she fact-checked Trump and said that there was no evidence of voter fraud from Dominion. Carlson said that Heinrich's actions "needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down", while Heinrich deleted the fact-check the next morning. In March 2023, more of Fox's internal communications were released. One November 2020 communication showed Fox CEO Suzanne Scott criticizing fact-checking, stating that she cannot "keep defending these reporters who don't understand our viewers and how to handle stories ... The audience feels like we crapped on" them, and Fox was losing their audience's "trust and belief" in them. Another December 2020 communication showed Scott responding to Fox presenter Eric Shawn's fact-checking of Donald Trump's false 2020 election claims by demanding that the fact-checking "has to stop now ... This is bad business ... The audience is furious." On March 31, 2023, Delaware Superior Court judge Eric Davis ruled in a summary judgment that it "is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true" and ordered for the case to go to trial. On April 18, 2023, Fox News reached a settlement with Dominion just before the trial started, concluding the lawsuit; Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million, and further stated: "We acknowledge the Court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false". In April 2021, at least five Fox News and Fox Business personalities amplified a story published by the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, that incorrectly linked a university study to President Joe Biden's climate change agenda, to falsely assert that Americans would be compelled to dramatically reduce their meat consumption to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions caused by flatulence. Fox News aired a graphic detailing the supposed compulsory reductions, falsely indicating the information came from the Agriculture Department, which numerous Republican politicians and commentators tweeted. Fox News anchor John Roberts reported to "say goodbye to your burgers if you want to sign up to the Biden climate agenda." Days later, Roberts acknowledged on air that the story was false. According to analysis by Media Matters, on May 12, 2021, Fox News reported on its website: "Biden resumes border wall construction after promising to halt it". Correspondent Bill Melugin then appeared on Special Report with Bret Baier to report "the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is actually going to be restarting border wall construction down in the Rio Grande Valley" after "a lot of blowback and pressure from local residents and local politicians." After the Corps of Engineers tweeted a clarification, Melugin deleted a tweet about the story and tweeted an "update" clarifying that a levee wall was being constructed to mitigate damage to flood control systems caused by uncompleted wall construction, and the website story headline was changed to "Biden administration to resume border wall levee construction as crisis worsens." Later on Fox News Primetime, host Brian Kilmeade briefly noted the levee but commented to former Trump advisor Stephen Miller: "They're going to restart building the wall again, Stephen." Fox News host Sean Hannity later broadcast the original Melugin story without any mention of the levee. Media Matters reported in September 2024 that during the Biden presidency Fox News had promoted a false "crime crisis" narrative, particularly directed toward undocumented migrants, which reflected Donald Trump's political rhetoric. The Fox News narrative consisted of reported violent crime anecdotes rather than FBI crime rate statistics showing violent crime had declined significantly since 2020. One Fox host, Ainsley Earhardt, said that even if the FBI data were right, "we're all a little bit more scared than we used to be." Later that month, weeks before the 2024 presidential election, the FBI released crime data for 2023 showing that violent crime had declined 3% from 2022. The report was widely covered by mainstream news outlets that day, though the Fox News coverage was limited to a 28-second segment by evening anchor Bret Baier. He reported "critics say the report is not accurate because it does not include big cities," echoing a false assertion made by Elon Musk and other Trump supporters on social media. Controversies The network has been accused of permitting sexual harassment and racial discrimination by on-air hosts, executives, and employees, paying out millions of dollars in legal settlements. Prominent Fox News figures such as Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly and Eric Bolling were fired after many women accused them of sexual harassment. At least four lawsuits alleged Fox News co-president Bill Shine ignored, enabled or concealed Roger Ailes' alleged sexual harassment. Fox News CEO Rupert Murdoch has dismissed the high-profile sexual misconduct allegations as "largely political" and speculated they were made "because we are conservative". Bill O'Reilly and Fox News settled six agreements, totaling $45 million, with women who accused O'Reilly of sexual harassment. In January 2017, shortly after Bill O'Reilly settled a sexual harassment lawsuit for $32 million ("an extraordinarily large amount for such cases"), Fox News renewed Bill O'Reilly's contract. Fox News's parent company, 21st Century Fox, said it was aware of the lawsuit. The contract between O'Reilly and Fox News read he could not be fired from the network unless sexual harassment allegations were proven in court. Fox News's extensive coverage of the Harvey Weinstein scandal in October 2017 was seen by some as hypocritical. Fox News dedicated at least 12 hours of coverage to the Weinstein scandal, yet only dedicated 20 minutes to Bill O'Reilly, who just like Weinstein had been accused of sexual harassment by a multitude of women. A few weeks later, when a number of females under the age of 18, including a 14-year-old, accused Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore of making sexual advances, Hannity dismissed the sexual misconduct allegations and dedicated coverage on his television show to casting doubt on the accusers. Other prime-time Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham queried The Washington Post's reporting or opted to bring up sexual misconduct allegations regarding show business figures such as Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K. Fox News figures Jeanine Pirro and Gregg Jarrett questioned both the validity of The Washington Post's reporting and that of the women. In December 2017, a few days before the Alabama Senate election, Fox News, along with the conspiracy websites Breitbart News and The Gateway Pundit, ran an inaccurate headline which claimed one of Roy Moore's accusers admitted to forging an inscription by Roy Moore in her yearbook; Fox News later added a correction to the story. A number of Fox News hosts have welcomed Bill O'Reilly to their shows and paid tributes to Roger Ailes after his death. In May 2017, Hannity called Ailes "a second father" and said to Ailes's "enemies" that he was "preparing to kick your a** in the next life". Ailes had the year before been fired from Fox News after women alleged he sexually harassed them. In September 2017, several months after Bill O'Reilly was fired from Fox News in the wake of women alleging he sexually harassed them, Hannity hosted O'Reilly on his show. Some Fox News employees criticized the decision. According to CNN, during the interview, Hannity found kinship with O'Reilly as he appeared "to feel that he and O'Reilly have both become victims of liberals looking to silence them." In September 2009, the Obama administration engaged in a verbal conflict with Fox News Channel. On September 20, President Barack Obama appeared on all major news programs except Fox News, a snub partially in response to remarks about him by commentators Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Fox coverage of Obama's health-care proposal. In late September 2009, Obama's senior advisor David Axelrod and Roger Ailes met in secret to attempt to smooth out tensions between the two camps. Two weeks later, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel referred to FNC as "not a news network" and communications director Anita Dunn said "Fox News often operates as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party". Obama commented: "If media is operating basically as a talk radio format, then that's one thing, and if it's operating as a news outlet, then that's another." Emanuel said it was important "to not have the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led in following Fox". Within days, it was reported that Fox had been excluded from an interview with administration official Ken Feinberg, with bureau chiefs from the White House press pool (ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN) coming to Fox's defense. A bureau chief said: "If any member had been excluded it would have been the same thing, it has nothing to do with Fox or the White House or the substance of the issues." Shortly after the story broke, the White House admitted to a low-level mistake, saying Fox had not made a specific request to interview Feinberg. Fox White House correspondent Major Garrett said he had not made a specific request, but had a "standing request from me as senior White House correspondent on Fox to interview any newsmaker at the Treasury at any given time news is being made". On November 8, 2009, the Los Angeles Times reported an unnamed Democratic consultant was warned by the White House not to appear on Fox News again. According to the article, Dunn claimed in an e-mail to have checked with colleagues who "deal with TV issues" who denied telling anyone to avoid Fox. Patrick Caddell, a Fox News contributor and former pollster for President Jimmy Carter, said he had spoken with other Democratic consultants who had received similar warnings from the White House. On October 2, 2013, Fox News host Anna Kooiman cited on the air a fake story from the National Report parody site, which claimed Obama had offered to keep the International Museum of Muslim Cultures open with cash from his own pocket. Fox News attracted controversy in April 2018 when it was revealed primetime host Sean Hannity had defended Trump's then personal attorney Michael Cohen on air without disclosing Cohen was his lawyer. On April 9, 2018, federal agents from the U.S. Attorney's office served a search warrant on Cohen's office and residence. On the air, Hannity defended Cohen and criticized the federal action, calling it "highly questionable" and "an unprecedented abuse of power". On April 16, 2018, in a court hearing, Cohen's lawyers told the judge that Cohen had ten clients in 2017–2018 but did "traditional legal tasks" for only three, including Trump. The federal judge ordered the revelation of the third client, whom Cohen's lawyers named as Hannity. Hannity was not sanctioned by Fox News for this breach of journalistic ethics, with Fox News releasing a statement that the channel was unaware of Hannity's relationship to Cohen and that it had "spoken to Sean and he continues to have our full support." Media ethics experts said that Hannity's disclosure failure was a major breach of journalistic ethics and that the network should have suspended or fired him for it. In mid-2021, Fox News agreed to pay a $1 million settlement to New York City after its Commission on Human Rights cited "a pattern of violating the NYC Human Rights Law". A Fox News spokesperson claimed that "FOX News Media has already been in full compliance across the board, but [settled] to continue enacting extensive preventive measures against all forms of discrimination and harassment." International transmission The Fox News Channel feed has international availability via multiple providers, while Fox Extra segments provide alternate programming. Fox News is carried in more than 40 countries. In Australia, FNC is broadcast on the dominant pay television provider Foxtel. FNC reached Brazil through Sky Brasil on November 1, 2002, after being introduced at ABTA 2002. Commercials on FNC are replaced with Fox Extra. It is available on Vivo TV. Fox had initially planned to launch a joint venture with Canwest's Global Television Network, tentatively named Fox News Canada, which would have featured a mixture of U.S. and Canadian news programming. As a result, the CRTC denied a 2003 application requesting permission for Fox News Channel to be carried in Canada. However, in March 2004, a Fox executive said the venture had been shelved; in November of that year, the CRTC added Fox News to its whitelist of foreign channels that may be carried by television providers. In May 2023, the CRTC announced that it would open a public consultation regarding the channel's carriage in Canada, acting upon complaints by the LGBT advocacy group Egale Canada surrounding an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight that contained content described as "malicious misinformation" regarding trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and two-spirit communities, including "the inflammatory and false claim that trans people are 'targeting' Christians." It is available through streaming service Disney+ Hotstar. In Indonesia, it is available on Channel 397 on pay-TV provider First Media. In Israel, FNC is broadcast on Channel 105 of the satellite provider Yes, as well as being carried on Cellcom TV and Partner TV. It is also broadcast on channel 200 on cable operator HOT. In Italy, FNC is broadcast on Sky Italia. Fox News was launched on Stream TV in 2001, and moved to Sky Italia in 2003. Although service to Japan ceased in summer 2003, it can still be seen on Americable (distributor for American bases), Mediatti (Kadena Air Base) and Pan Global TV Japan. The channel's international feed is being carried by cable provider Izzi Telecom. In the Netherlands, Fox News has been carried by cable providers UPC Nederland and CASEMA, and satellite provider Canaldigitaal; all have dropped the channel in recent years. At this time, only cable provider Caiway (available in a limited number of towns in the central part of the country) is broadcasting the channel. The channel was also carried by IPTV provider KNIPPR (owned by T-Mobile). In New Zealand, FNC is broadcast on Channel 088 of pay satellite operator SKY Network Television's digital platform. It was formerly broadcast overnight on free-to-air UHF New Zealand TV channel Prime; this was discontinued in January 2010, reportedly due to an expiring broadcasting license. In Pakistan, Fox News Channel is available on PTCL Smart TV and a number of cable and IPTV operators. In the Philippines, Fox News Channel is available on Sky Cable, Cablelink and G Sat Channel 50. It was available on Cignal until January 1, 2021, due to contract expiration; however, the channel returned on June 16, 2022. In Portugal, Fox News was available on Meo. The channel is however no longer available on the operator and it is not carried by other Portuguese TV operators. Between 2003 and 2006, in Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, FNC was broadcast 16 hours a day on TV8 (with Fox News Extra segments replacing U.S. advertising). Fox News was dropped by TV8 in September 2006. In Singapore, FNC is broadcast on pay-TV operator StarHub TV, as well on Singtel TV. In South Africa, FNC is broadcast on StarSat. The most popular pay television operator, DStv, does not offer FNC in its channel bouquet. In Spain, Fox News was available on Movistar Plus+. The channel was part of the operator since its first incarnation as Canal Satellite Digital in the early 2000s, but was later removed from the operator's satellite offer by March 2023, and ceased transmission to the remaining offers on July 9, 2024. The channel is not carried by other Spanish TV operators. FNC was carried in the United Kingdom by Sky. On August 29, 2017, Sky dropped Fox News; the broadcaster said its carriage was not "commercially viable" due to average viewership of fewer than 2,000 viewers per day. The company said the decision was unrelated to 21st Century Fox's proposed acquisition of the remainder of Sky plc (which ultimately led to a bidding war that resulted in its acquisition by Comcast instead). The potential co-ownership had prompted concerns from critics of the deal, who felt Sky News could similarly undergo a shift to an opinionated format with a right-wing viewpoint. However, such a move would violate Ofcom broadcast codes, which requires all news programming to show due impartiality. The channel's broadcasts in the country have violated this rule on several occasions. Notable personalities See also Notes References Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Artificial_intelligence_associations] | [TOKENS: 50] |
Category:Artificial intelligence associations Subcategories This category has only the following subcategory. Pages in category "Artificial intelligence associations" The following 32 pages are in this category, out of 32 total. This list may not reflect recent changes. |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#cite_ref-Esquire_37-0] | [TOKENS: 10515] |
Contents Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk (/ˈiːlɒn/ EE-lon; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman and entrepreneur known for his leadership of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, and xAI. Musk has been the wealthiest person in the world since 2025; as of February 2026,[update] Forbes estimates his net worth to be around US$852 billion. Born into a wealthy family in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk emigrated in 1989 to Canada; he has Canadian citizenship since his mother was born there. He received bachelor's degrees in 1997 from the University of Pennsylvania before moving to California to pursue business ventures. In 1995, Musk co-founded the software company Zip2. Following its sale in 1999, he co-founded X.com, an online payment company that later merged to form PayPal, which was acquired by eBay in 2002. Musk also became an American citizen in 2002. In 2002, Musk founded the space technology company SpaceX, becoming its CEO and chief engineer; the company has since led innovations in reusable rockets and commercial spaceflight. Musk joined the automaker Tesla as an early investor in 2004 and became its CEO and product architect in 2008; it has since become a leader in electric vehicles. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI to advance artificial intelligence (AI) research, but later left; growing discontent with the organization's direction and their leadership in the AI boom in the 2020s led him to establish xAI, which became a subsidiary of SpaceX in 2026. In 2022, he acquired the social network Twitter, implementing significant changes, and rebranding it as X in 2023. His other businesses include the neurotechnology company Neuralink, which he co-founded in 2016, and the tunneling company the Boring Company, which he founded in 2017. In November 2025, a Tesla pay package worth $1 trillion for Musk was approved, which he is to receive over 10 years if he meets specific goals. Musk was the largest donor in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, where he supported Donald Trump. After Trump was inaugurated as president in early 2025, Musk served as Senior Advisor to the President and as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). After a public feud with Trump, Musk left the Trump administration and returned to managing his companies. Musk is a supporter of global far-right figures, causes, and political parties. His political activities, views, and statements have made him a polarizing figure. Musk has been criticized for COVID-19 misinformation, promoting conspiracy theories, and affirming antisemitic, racist, and transphobic comments. His acquisition of Twitter was controversial due to a subsequent increase in hate speech and the spread of misinformation on the service, following his pledge to decrease censorship. His role in the second Trump administration attracted public backlash, particularly in response to DOGE. The emails he sent to Jeffrey Epstein are included in the Epstein files, which were published between 2025–26 and became a topic of worldwide debate. Early life Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa's administrative capital. He is of British and Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry. His mother, Maye (née Haldeman), is a model and dietitian born in Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in South Africa. Musk therefore holds both South African and Canadian citizenship from birth. His father, Errol Musk, is a South African electromechanical engineer, pilot, sailor, consultant, emerald dealer, and property developer, who partly owned a rental lodge at Timbavati Private Nature Reserve. His maternal grandfather, Joshua N. Haldeman, who died in a plane crash when Elon was a toddler, was an American-born Canadian chiropractor, aviator and political activist in the technocracy movement who moved to South Africa in 1950. Elon has a younger brother, Kimbal, a younger sister, Tosca, and four paternal half-siblings. Musk was baptized as a child in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. Despite both Elon and Errol previously stating that Errol was a part owner of a Zambian emerald mine, in 2023, Errol recounted that the deal he made was to receive "a portion of the emeralds produced at three small mines". Errol was elected to the Pretoria City Council as a representative of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party and has said that his children shared their father's dislike of apartheid. After his parents divorced in 1979, Elon, aged around 9, chose to live with his father because Errol Musk had an Encyclopædia Britannica and a computer. Elon later regretted his decision and became estranged from his father. Elon has recounted trips to a wilderness school that he described as a "paramilitary Lord of the Flies" where "bullying was a virtue" and children were encouraged to fight over rations. In one incident, after an altercation with a fellow pupil, Elon was thrown down concrete steps and beaten severely, leading to him being hospitalized for his injuries. Elon described his father berating him after he was discharged from the hospital. Errol denied berating Elon and claimed, "The [other] boy had just lost his father to suicide, and Elon had called him stupid. Elon had a tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?" Elon was an enthusiastic reader of books, and had attributed his success in part to having read The Lord of the Rings, the Foundation series, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. At age ten, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program from the VIC-20 user manual. At age twelve, Elon sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500 (equivalent to $1,600 in 2025). Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, and then Pretoria Boys High School, where he graduated. Musk was a decent but unexceptional student, earning a 61/100 in Afrikaans and a B on his senior math certification. Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother to avoid South Africa's mandatory military service, which would have forced him to participate in the apartheid regime, as well as to ease his path to immigration to the United States. While waiting for his application to be processed, he attended the University of Pretoria for five months. Musk arrived in Canada in June 1989, connected with a second cousin in Saskatchewan, and worked odd jobs, including at a farm and a lumber mill. In 1990, he entered Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied until 1995. Although Musk has said that he earned his degrees in 1995, the University of Pennsylvania did not award them until 1997 – a Bachelor of Arts in physics and a Bachelor of Science in economics from the university's Wharton School. He reportedly hosted large, ticketed house parties to help pay for tuition, and wrote a business plan for an electronic book-scanning service similar to Google Books. In 1994, Musk held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic supercapacitors for energy storage, and another at Palo Alto–based startup Rocket Science Games. In 1995, he was accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University, but did not enroll. Musk decided to join the Internet boom of the 1990s, applying for a job at Netscape, to which he reportedly never received a response. The Washington Post reported that Musk lacked legal authorization to remain and work in the United States after failing to enroll at Stanford. In response, Musk said he was allowed to work at that time and that his student visa transitioned to an H1-B. According to numerous former business associates and shareholders, Musk said he was on a student visa at the time. Business career In 1995, Musk, his brother Kimbal, and Greg Kouri founded the web software company Zip2 with funding from a group of angel investors. They housed the venture at a small rented office in Palo Alto. Replying to Rolling Stone, Musk denounced the notion that they started their company with funds borrowed from Errol Musk, but in a tweet, he recognized that his father contributed 10% of a later funding round. The company developed and marketed an Internet city guide for the newspaper publishing industry, with maps, directions, and yellow pages. According to Musk, "The website was up during the day and I was coding it at night, seven days a week, all the time." To impress investors, Musk built a large plastic structure around a standard computer to create the impression that Zip2 was powered by a small supercomputer. The Musk brothers obtained contracts with The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, and persuaded the board of directors to abandon plans for a merger with CitySearch. Musk's attempts to become CEO were thwarted by the board. Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash in February 1999 (equivalent to $590,000,000 in 2025), and Musk received $22 million (equivalent to $43,000,000 in 2025) for his 7-percent share. In 1999, Musk co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company. The startup was one of the first federally insured online banks, and, in its initial months of operation, over 200,000 customers joined the service. The company's investors regarded Musk as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year. The following year, X.com merged with online bank Confinity to avoid competition. Founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, Confinity had its own money-transfer service, PayPal, which was more popular than X.com's service. Within the merged company, Musk returned as CEO. Musk's preference for Microsoft software over Unix created a rift in the company and caused Thiel to resign. Due to resulting technological issues and lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in 2000.[b] Under Thiel, the company focused on the PayPal service and was renamed PayPal in 2001. In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion (equivalent to $2,700,000,000 in 2025) in stock, of which Musk—the largest shareholder with 11.72% of shares—received $175.8 million (equivalent to $320,000,000 in 2025). In 2017, Musk purchased the domain X.com from PayPal for an undisclosed amount, stating that it had sentimental value. In 2001, Musk became involved with the nonprofit Mars Society and discussed funding plans to place a growth-chamber for plants on Mars. Seeking a way to launch the greenhouse payloads into space, Musk made two unsuccessful trips to Moscow to purchase intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) from Russian companies NPO Lavochkin and Kosmotras. Musk instead decided to start a company to build affordable rockets. With $100 million of his early fortune, (equivalent to $180,000,000 in 2025) Musk founded SpaceX in May 2002 and became the company's CEO and Chief Engineer. SpaceX attempted its first launch of the Falcon 1 rocket in 2006. Although the rocket failed to reach Earth orbit, it was awarded a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program contract from NASA, then led by Mike Griffin. After two more failed attempts that nearly caused Musk to go bankrupt, SpaceX succeeded in launching the Falcon 1 into orbit in 2008. Later that year, SpaceX received a $1.6 billion NASA contract (equivalent to $2,400,000,000 in 2025) for Falcon 9-launched Dragon spacecraft flights to the International Space Station (ISS), replacing the Space Shuttle after its 2011 retirement. In 2012, the Dragon vehicle docked with the ISS, a first for a commercial spacecraft. Working towards its goal of reusable rockets, in 2015 SpaceX successfully landed the first stage of a Falcon 9 on a land platform. Later landings were achieved on autonomous spaceport drone ships, an ocean-based recovery platform. In 2018, SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy; the inaugural mission carried Musk's personal Tesla Roadster as a dummy payload. Since 2019, SpaceX has been developing Starship, a reusable, super heavy-lift launch vehicle intended to replace the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. In 2020, SpaceX launched its first crewed flight, the Demo-2, becoming the first private company to place astronauts into orbit and dock a crewed spacecraft with the ISS. In 2024, NASA awarded SpaceX an $843 million (equivalent to $865,000,000 in 2025) contract to build a spacecraft that NASA will use to deorbit the ISS at the end of its lifespan. In 2015, SpaceX began development of the Starlink constellation of low Earth orbit satellites to provide satellite Internet access. After the launch of prototype satellites in 2018, the first large constellation was deployed in May 2019. As of May 2025[update], over 7,600 Starlink satellites are operational, comprising 65% of all operational Earth satellites. The total cost of the decade-long project to design, build, and deploy the constellation was estimated by SpaceX in 2020 to be $10 billion (equivalent to $12,000,000,000 in 2025).[c] During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Musk provided free Starlink service to Ukraine, permitting Internet access and communication at a yearly cost to SpaceX of $400 million (equivalent to $440,000,000 in 2025). However, Musk refused to block Russian state media on Starlink. In 2023, Musk denied Ukraine's request to activate Starlink over Crimea to aid an attack against the Russian navy, citing fears of a nuclear response. Tesla, Inc., originally Tesla Motors, was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Both men played active roles in the company's early development prior to Musk's involvement. Musk led the Series A round of investment in February 2004; he invested $6.35 million (equivalent to $11,000,000 in 2025), became the majority shareholder, and joined Tesla's board of directors as chairman. Musk took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design, but was not deeply involved in day-to-day business operations. Following a series of escalating conflicts in 2007 and the 2008 financial crisis, Eberhard was ousted from the firm.[page needed] Musk assumed leadership of the company as CEO and product architect in 2008. A 2009 lawsuit settlement with Eberhard designated Musk as a Tesla co-founder, along with Tarpenning and two others. Tesla began delivery of the Roadster, an electric sports car, in 2008. With sales of about 2,500 vehicles, it was the first mass production all-electric car to use lithium-ion battery cells. Under Musk, Tesla has since launched several well-selling electric vehicles, including the four-door sedan Model S (2012), the crossover Model X (2015), the mass-market sedan Model 3 (2017), the crossover Model Y (2020), and the pickup truck Cybertruck (2023). In May 2020, Musk resigned as chairman of the board as part of the settlement of a lawsuit from the SEC over him tweeting that funding had been "secured" for potentially taking Tesla private. The company has also constructed multiple lithium-ion battery and electric vehicle factories, called Gigafactories. Since its initial public offering in 2010, Tesla stock has risen significantly; it became the most valuable carmaker in summer 2020, and it entered the S&P 500 later that year. In October 2021, it reached a market capitalization of $1 trillion (equivalent to $1,200,000,000,000 in 2025), the sixth company in U.S. history to do so. Musk provided the initial concept and financial capital for SolarCity, which his cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive founded in 2006. By 2013, SolarCity was the second largest provider of solar power systems in the United States. In 2014, Musk promoted the idea of SolarCity building an advanced production facility in Buffalo, New York, triple the size of the largest solar plant in the United States. Construction of the factory started in 2014 and was completed in 2017. It operated as a joint venture with Panasonic until early 2020. Tesla acquired SolarCity for $2 billion in 2016 (equivalent to $2,700,000,000 in 2025) and merged it with its battery unit to create Tesla Energy. The deal's announcement resulted in a more than 10% drop in Tesla's stock price; at the time, SolarCity was facing liquidity issues. Multiple shareholder groups filed a lawsuit against Musk and Tesla's directors, stating that the purchase of SolarCity was done solely to benefit Musk and came at the expense of Tesla and its shareholders. Tesla directors settled the lawsuit in January 2020, leaving Musk the sole remaining defendant. Two years later, the court ruled in Musk's favor. In 2016, Musk co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology startup, with an investment of $100 million. Neuralink aims to integrate the human brain with artificial intelligence (AI) by creating devices that are embedded in the brain. Such technology could enhance memory or allow the devices to communicate with software. The company also hopes to develop devices to treat neurological conditions like spinal cord injuries. In 2022, Neuralink announced that clinical trials would begin by the end of the year. In September 2023, the Food and Drug Administration approved Neuralink to initiate six-year human trials. Neuralink has conducted animal testing on macaques at the University of California, Davis. In 2021, the company released a video in which a macaque played the video game Pong via a Neuralink implant. The company's animal trials—which have caused the deaths of some monkeys—have led to claims of animal cruelty. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has alleged that Neuralink violated the Animal Welfare Act. Employees have complained that pressure from Musk to accelerate development has led to botched experiments and unnecessary animal deaths. In 2022, a federal probe was launched into possible animal welfare violations by Neuralink.[needs update] In 2017, Musk founded the Boring Company to construct tunnels; he also revealed plans for specialized, underground, high-occupancy vehicles that could travel up to 150 miles per hour (240 km/h) and thus circumvent above-ground traffic in major cities. Early in 2017, the company began discussions with regulatory bodies and initiated construction of a 30-foot (9.1 m) wide, 50-foot (15 m) long, and 15-foot (4.6 m) deep "test trench" on the premises of SpaceX's offices, as that required no permits. The Los Angeles tunnel, less than two miles (3.2 km) in length, debuted to journalists in 2018. It used Tesla Model Xs and was reported to be a rough ride while traveling at suboptimal speeds. Two tunnel projects announced in 2018, in Chicago and West Los Angeles, have been canceled. A tunnel beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center was completed in early 2021. Local officials have approved further expansions of the tunnel system. April 14, 2022 In early 2017, Musk expressed interest in buying Twitter and had questioned the platform's commitment to freedom of speech. By 2022, Musk had reached 9.2% stake in the company, making him the largest shareholder.[d] Musk later agreed to a deal that would appoint him to Twitter's board of directors and prohibit him from acquiring more than 14.9% of the company. Days later, Musk made a $43 billion offer to buy Twitter. By the end of April Musk had successfully concluded his bid for approximately $44 billion. This included approximately $12.5 billion in loans and $21 billion in equity financing. Having backtracked on his initial decision, Musk bought the company on October 27, 2022. Immediately after the acquisition, Musk fired several top Twitter executives including CEO Parag Agrawal; Musk became the CEO instead. Under Elon Musk, Twitter instituted monthly subscriptions for a "blue check", and laid off a significant portion of the company's staff. Musk lessened content moderation and hate speech also increased on the platform after his takeover. In late 2022, Musk released internal documents relating to Twitter's moderation of Hunter Biden's laptop controversy in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. Musk also promised to step down as CEO after a Twitter poll, and five months later, Musk stepped down as CEO and transitioned his role to executive chairman and chief technology officer (CTO). Despite Musk stepping down as CEO, X continues to struggle with challenges such as viral misinformation, hate speech, and antisemitism controversies. Musk has been accused of trying to silence some of his critics such as Twitch streamer Asmongold, who criticized him during one of his streams. Musk has been accused of removing their accounts' blue checkmarks, which hinders visibility and is considered a form of shadow banning, or suspending their accounts without justification. Other activities In August 2013, Musk announced plans for a version of a vactrain, and assigned engineers from SpaceX and Tesla to design a transport system between Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, at an estimated cost of $6 billion. Later that year, Musk unveiled the concept, dubbed the Hyperloop, intended to make travel cheaper than any other mode of transport for such long distances. In December 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI, a not-for-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research company aiming to develop artificial general intelligence, intended to be safe and beneficial to humanity. Musk pledged $1 billion of funding to the company, and initially gave $50 million. In 2018, Musk left the OpenAI board. Since 2018, OpenAI has made significant advances in machine learning. In July 2023, Musk launched the artificial intelligence company xAI, which aims to develop a generative AI program that competes with existing offerings like OpenAI's ChatGPT. Musk obtained funding from investors in SpaceX and Tesla, and xAI hired engineers from Google and OpenAI. December 16, 2022 Musk uses a private jet owned by Falcon Landing LLC, a SpaceX-linked company, and acquired a second jet in August 2020. His heavy use of the jets and the consequent fossil fuel usage have received criticism. Musk's flight usage is tracked on social media through ElonJet. In December 2022, Musk banned the ElonJet account on Twitter, and made temporary bans on the accounts of journalists that posted stories regarding the incident, including Donie O'Sullivan, Keith Olbermann, and journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Intercept. In October 2025, Musk's company xAI launched Grokipedia, an AI-generated online encyclopedia that he promoted as an alternative to Wikipedia. Articles on Grokipedia are generated and reviewed by xAI's Grok chatbot. Media coverage and academic analysis described Grokipedia as frequently reusing Wikipedia content but framing contested political and social topics in line with Musk's own views and right-wing narratives. A study by Cornell University researchers and NBC News stated that Grokipedia cites sources that are blacklisted or considered "generally unreliable" on Wikipedia, for example, the conspiracy site Infowars and the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront. Wired, The Guardian and Time criticized Grokipedia for factual errors and for presenting Musk himself in unusually positive terms while downplaying controversies. Politics Musk is an outlier among business leaders who typically avoid partisan political advocacy. Musk was a registered independent voter when he lived in California. Historically, he has donated to both Democrats and Republicans, many of whom serve in states in which he has a vested interest. Since 2022, his political contributions have mostly supported Republicans, with his first vote for a Republican going to Mayra Flores in the 2022 Texas's 34th congressional district special election. In 2024, he started supporting international far-right political parties, activists, and causes, and has shared misinformation and numerous conspiracy theories. Since 2024, his views have been generally described as right-wing. Musk supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, and Donald Trump in 2024. In the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Musk endorsed candidate Andrew Yang and expressed support for Yang's proposed universal basic income, and endorsed Kanye West's 2020 presidential campaign. In 2021, Musk publicly expressed opposition to the Build Back Better Act, a $3.5 trillion legislative package endorsed by Joe Biden that ultimately failed to pass due to unanimous opposition from congressional Republicans and several Democrats. In 2022, gave over $50 million to Citizens for Sanity, a conservative political action committee. In 2023, he supported Republican Ron DeSantis for the 2024 U.S. presidential election, giving $10 million to his campaign, and hosted DeSantis's campaign announcement on a Twitter Spaces event. From June 2023 to January 2024, Musk hosted a bipartisan set of X Spaces with Republican and Democratic candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, and Dean Phillips. In October 2025, former vice-president Kamala Harris commented that it was a mistake from the Democratic side to not invite Musk to a White House electric vehicle event organized in August 2021 and featuring executives from General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, despite Tesla being "the major American manufacturer of extraordinary innovation in this space." Fortune remarked that this was a nod to United Auto Workers and organized labor. Harris said presidents should put aside political loyalties when it came to recognizing innovation, and guessed that the non-invitation impacted Musk's perspective. Fortune noted that, at the time, Musk said, "Yeah, seems odd that Tesla wasn't invited." A month later, he criticized Biden as "not the friendliest administration." Jacob Silverman, author of the book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, said that the tech industry represented by Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and other capitalists, actually flourished under Biden, but the tech leaders chose Trump for their common ground on cultural issues. By early 2024, Musk had become a vocal and financial supporter of Donald Trump. In July 2024, minutes after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, Musk endorsed him for president saying; "I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery." During the presidential campaign, Musk joined Trump on stage at a campaign rally, and during the campaign promoted conspiracy theories and falsehoods about Democrats, election fraud and immigration, in support of Trump. Musk was the largest individual donor of the 2024 election. In 2025, Musk contributed $19 million to the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, hoping to influence the state's future redistricting efforts and its regulations governing car manufacturers and dealers. In 2023, Musk said he shunned the World Economic Forum because it was boring. The organization commented that they had not invited him since 2015. He has participated in Dialog, dubbed "Tech Bilderberg" and organized by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman, though. Musk's international political actions and comments have come under increasing scrutiny and criticism, especially from the governments and leaders of France, Germany, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, particularly due to his position in the U.S. government as well as ownership of X. An NBC News analysis found he had boosted far-right political movements to cut immigration and curtail regulation of business in at least 18 countries on six continents since 2023. During his speech after the second inauguration of Donald Trump, Musk twice made a gesture interpreted by many as a Nazi or a fascist Roman salute.[e] He thumped his right hand over his heart, fingers spread wide, and then extended his right arm out, emphatically, at an upward angle, palm down and fingers together. He then repeated the gesture to the crowd behind him. As he finished the gestures, he said to the crowd, "My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured." It was widely condemned as an intentional Nazi salute in Germany, where making such gestures is illegal. The Anti-Defamation League said it was not a Nazi salute, but other Jewish organizations disagreed and condemned the salute. American public opinion was divided on partisan lines as to whether it was a fascist salute. Musk dismissed the accusations of Nazi sympathies, deriding them as "dirty tricks" and a "tired" attack. Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups celebrated it as a Nazi salute. Multiple European political parties demanded that Musk be banned from entering their countries. The concept of DOGE emerged in a discussion between Musk and Donald Trump, and in August 2024, Trump committed to giving Musk an advisory role, with Musk accepting the offer. In November and December 2024, Musk suggested that the organization could help to cut the U.S. federal budget, consolidate the number of federal agencies, and eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and that its final stage would be "deleting itself". In January 2025, the organization was created by executive order, and Musk was designated a "special government employee". Musk led the organization and was a senior advisor to the president, although his official role is not clear. In sworn statement during a lawsuit, the director of the White House Office of Administration stated that Musk "is not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service or U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization", "is not the U.S. DOGE Service administrator", and has "no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself". Trump said two days later that he had put Musk in charge of DOGE. A federal judge has ruled that Musk acted as the de facto leader of DOGE. Musk's role in the second Trump administration, particularly in response to DOGE, has attracted public backlash. He was criticized for his treatment of federal government employees, including his influence over the mass layoffs of the federal workforce. He has prioritized secrecy within the organization and has accused others of violating privacy laws. A Senate report alleged that Musk could avoid up to $2 billion in legal liability as a result of DOGE's actions. In May 2025, Bill Gates accused Musk of "killing the world's poorest children" through his cuts to USAID, which modeling by Boston University estimated had resulted in 300,000 deaths by this time, most of them of children. By November 2025, the estimated death toll had increased to 400,000 children and 200,000 adults. Musk announced on May 28, 2025, that he would depart from the Trump administration as planned when the special government employee's 130 day deadline expired, with a White House official confirming that Musk's offboarding from the Trump administration was already underway. His departure was officially confirmed during a joint Oval Office press conference with Trump on May 30, 2025. @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. June 5, 2025 After leaving office, Musk criticized the Trump administration's Big Beautiful Bill, calling it a "disgusting abomination" due to its provisions increasing the deficit. A feud began between Musk and Trump, with its most notable event being Musk alleging Trump had ties to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on X (formerly Twitter) on June 5, 2025. Trump responded on Truth Social stating that Musk went "CRAZY" after the "EV Mandate" was purportedly taken away and threatened to cut Musk's government contracts. Musk then called for a third Trump impeachment. The next day, Trump stated that he did not wish to reconcile with Musk, and added that Musk would face "very serious consequences" if he funds Democratic candidates. On June 11, Musk publicly apologized for the tweets against Trump, saying they "went too far". Views November 6, 2022 Rejecting the conservative label, Musk has described himself as a political moderate, even as his views have become more right-wing over time. His views have been characterized as libertarian and far-right, and after his involvement in European politics, they have received criticism from world leaders such as Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz. Within the context of American politics, Musk supported Democratic candidates up until 2022, at which point he voted for a Republican for the first time. He has stated support for universal basic income, gun rights, freedom of speech, a tax on carbon emissions, and H-1B visas. Musk has expressed concern about issues such as artificial intelligence (AI) and climate change, and has been a critic of wealth tax, short-selling, and government subsidies. An immigrant himself, Musk has been accused of being anti-immigration, and regularly blames immigration policies for illegal immigration. He is also a pronatalist who believes population decline is the biggest threat to civilization, and identifies as a cultural Christian. Musk has long been an advocate for space colonization, especially the colonization of Mars. He has repeatedly pushed for humanity colonizing Mars, in order to become an interplanetary species and lower the risks of human extinction. Musk has promoted conspiracy theories and made controversial statements that have led to accusations of racism, sexism, antisemitism, transphobia, disseminating disinformation, and support of white pride. While describing himself as a "pro-Semite", his comments regarding George Soros and Jewish communities have been condemned by the Anti-Defamation League and the Biden White House. Musk was criticized during the COVID-19 pandemic for making unfounded epidemiological claims, defying COVID-19 lockdowns restrictions, and supporting the Canada convoy protest against vaccine mandates. He has amplified false claims of white genocide in South Africa. Musk has been critical of Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip during the Gaza war, praised China's economic and climate goals, suggested that Taiwan and China should resolve cross-strait relations, and was described as having a close relationship with the Chinese government. In Europe, Musk expressed support for Ukraine in 2022 during the Russian invasion, recommended referendums and peace deals on the annexed Russia-occupied territories, and supported the far-right Alternative for Germany political party in 2024. Regarding British politics, Musk blamed the 2024 UK riots on mass migration and open borders, criticized Prime Minister Keir Starmer for what he described as a "two-tier" policing system, and was subsequently attacked as being responsible for spreading misinformation and amplifying the far-right. He has also voiced his support for far-right activist Tommy Robinson and pledged electoral support for Reform UK. In February 2026, Musk described Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez as a "tyrant" following Sánchez's proposal to prohibit minors under the age of 16 from accessing social media platforms. Legal affairs In 2018, Musk was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a tweet stating that funding had been secured for potentially taking Tesla private.[f] The securities fraud lawsuit characterized the tweet as false, misleading, and damaging to investors, and sought to bar Musk from serving as CEO of publicly traded companies. Two days later, Musk settled with the SEC, without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations. As a result, Musk and Tesla were fined $20 million each, and Musk was forced to step down for three years as Tesla chairman but was able to remain as CEO. Shareholders filed a lawsuit over the tweet, and in February 2023, a jury found Musk and Tesla not liable. Musk has stated in interviews that he does not regret posting the tweet that triggered the SEC investigation. In 2019, Musk stated in a tweet that Tesla would build half a million cars that year. The SEC reacted by asking a court to hold him in contempt for violating the terms of the 2018 settlement agreement. A joint agreement between Musk and the SEC eventually clarified the previous agreement details, including a list of topics about which Musk needed preclearance. In 2020, a judge blocked a lawsuit that claimed a tweet by Musk regarding Tesla stock price ("too high imo") violated the agreement. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)-released records showed that the SEC concluded Musk had subsequently violated the agreement twice by tweeting regarding "Tesla's solar roof production volumes and its stock price". In October 2023, the SEC sued Musk over his refusal to testify a third time in an investigation into whether he violated federal law by purchasing Twitter stock in 2022. In February 2024, Judge Laurel Beeler ruled that Musk must testify again. In January 2025, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Musk for securities violations related to his purchase of Twitter. In January 2024, Delaware judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled in a 2018 lawsuit that Musk's $55 billion pay package from Tesla be rescinded. McCormick called the compensation granted by the company's board "an unfathomable sum" that was unfair to shareholders. The Delaware Supreme Court overturned McCormick's decision in December 2025, restoring Musk's compensation package and awarding $1 in nominal damages. Personal life Musk became a U.S. citizen in 2002. From the early 2000s until late 2020, Musk resided in California, where both Tesla and SpaceX were founded. He then relocated to Cameron County, Texas, saying that California had become "complacent" about its economic success. While hosting Saturday Night Live in 2021, Musk stated that he has Asperger syndrome (an outdated term for autism spectrum disorder). When asked about his experience growing up with Asperger's syndrome in a TED2022 conference in Vancouver, Musk stated that "the social cues were not intuitive ... I would just tend to take things very literally ... but then that turned out to be wrong — [people were not] simply saying exactly what they mean, there's all sorts of other things that are meant, and [it] took me a while to figure that out." Musk suffers from back pain and has undergone several spine-related surgeries, including a disc replacement. In 2000, he contracted a severe case of malaria while on vacation in South Africa. Musk has stated he uses doctor-prescribed ketamine for occasional depression and that he doses "a small amount once every other week or something like that"; since January 2024, some media outlets have reported that he takes ketamine, marijuana, LSD, ecstasy, mushrooms, cocaine and other drugs. Musk at first refused to comment on his alleged drug use, before responding that he had not tested positive for drugs, and that if drugs somehow improved his productivity, "I would definitely take them!". The New York Times' investigations revealed Musk's overuse of ketamine and numerous other drugs, as well as strained family relationships and concerns from close associates who have become troubled by his public behavior as he became more involved in political activities and government work. According to The Washington Post, President Trump described Musk as "a big-time drug addict". Through his own label Emo G Records, Musk released a rap track, "RIP Harambe", on SoundCloud in March 2019. The following year, he released an EDM track, "Don't Doubt Ur Vibe", featuring his own lyrics and vocals. Musk plays video games, which he stated has a "'restoring effect' that helps his 'mental calibration'". Some games he plays include Quake, Diablo IV, Elden Ring, and Polytopia. Musk once claimed to be one of the world's top video game players but has since admitted to "account boosting", or cheating by hiring outside services to achieve top player rankings. Musk has justified the boosting by claiming that all top accounts do it so he has to as well to remain competitive. In 2024 and 2025, Musk criticized the video game Assassin's Creed Shadows and its creator Ubisoft for "woke" content. Musk posted to X that "DEI kills art" and specified the inclusion of the historical figure Yasuke in the Assassin's Creed game as offensive; he also called the game "terrible". Ubisoft responded by saying that Musk's comments were "just feeding hatred" and that they were focused on producing a game not pushing politics. Musk has fathered at least 14 children, one of whom died as an infant. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2025 that sources close to Musk suggest that the "true number of Musk's children is much higher than publicly known". He had six children with his first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, whom he met while attending Queen's University in Ontario, Canada; they married in 2000. In 2002, their first child Nevada Musk died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 10 weeks. After his death, the couple used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to continue their family; they had twins in 2004, followed by triplets in 2006. The couple divorced in 2008 and have shared custody of their children. The elder twin he had with Wilson came out as a trans woman and, in 2022, officially changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson, adopting her mother's surname because she no longer wished to be associated with Musk. Musk began dating English actress Talulah Riley in 2008. They married two years later at Dornoch Cathedral in Scotland. In 2012, the couple divorced, then remarried the following year. After briefly filing for divorce in 2014, Musk finalized a second divorce from Riley in 2016. Musk then dated the American actress Amber Heard for several months in 2017; he had reportedly been "pursuing" her since 2012. In 2018, Musk and Canadian musician Grimes confirmed they were dating. Grimes and Musk have three children, born in 2020, 2021, and 2022.[g] Musk and Grimes originally gave their eldest child the name "X Æ A-12", which would have violated California regulations as it contained characters that are not in the modern English alphabet; the names registered on the birth certificate are "X" as a first name, "Æ A-Xii" as a middle name, and "Musk" as a last name. They received criticism for choosing a name perceived to be impractical and difficult to pronounce; Musk has said the intended pronunciation is "X Ash A Twelve". Their second child was born via surrogacy. Despite the pregnancy, Musk confirmed reports that the couple were "semi-separated" in September 2021; in an interview with Time in December 2021, he said he was single. In October 2023, Grimes sued Musk over parental rights and custody of X Æ A-Xii. Elon Musk has taken X Æ A-Xii to multiple official events in Washington, D.C. during Trump's second term in office. Also in July 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk allegedly had an affair with Nicole Shanahan, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in 2021, leading to their divorce the following year. Musk denied the report. Musk also had a relationship with Australian actress Natasha Bassett, who has been described as "an occasional girlfriend". In October 2024, The New York Times reported Musk bought a Texas compound for his children and their mothers, though Musk denied having done so. Musk also has four children with Shivon Zilis, director of operations and special projects at Neuralink: twins born via IVF in 2021, a child born in 2024 via surrogacy and a child born in 2025.[h] On February 14, 2025, Ashley St. Clair, an influencer and author, posted on X claiming to have given birth to Musk's son Romulus five months earlier, which media outlets reported as Musk's supposed thirteenth child.[i] On February 22, 2025, it was reported that St Clair had filed for sole custody of her five-month-old son and for Musk to be recognised as the child's father. On March 31, 2025, Musk wrote that, while he was unsure if he was the father of St. Clair's child, he had paid St. Clair $2.5 million and would continue paying her $500,000 per year.[j] Later reporting from the Wall Street Journal indicated that $1 million of these payments to St. Clair were structured as a loan. In 2014, Musk and Ghislaine Maxwell appeared together in a photograph taken at an Academy Awards after-party, which Musk later described as a "photobomb". The January 2026 Epstein files contain emails between Musk and Epstein from 2012 to 2013, after Epstein's first conviction. Emails released on January 30, 2026, indicated that Epstein invited Musk to visit his private island on multiple occasions. The correspondence showed that while Epstein repeatedly encouraged Musk to attend, Musk did not visit the island. In one instance, Musk discussed the possibility of attending a party with his then-wife Talulah Riley and asked which day would be the "wildest party"; according to the emails, the visit did not take place after Epstein later cancelled the plans.[k] On Christmas day in 2012, Musk emailed Epstein asking "Do you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for". Epstein replied that the "ratio on my island" might make Musk's wife uncomfortable to which Musk responded, "Ratio is not a problem for Talulah". On September 11, 2013, Epstein sent an email asking Musk if he had any plans for coming to New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly where many "interesting people" would be coming to his house to which Musk responded that "Flying to NY to see UN diplomats do nothing would be an unwise use of time". Epstein responded by stating "Do you think i am retarded. Just kidding, there is no one over 25 and all very cute." Musk has denied any close relationship with Epstein and described him as a "creep" who attempted to ingratiate himself with influential people. When Musk was asked in 2019 if he introduced Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg, Musk responded: "I don’t recall introducing Epstein to anyone, as I don’t know the guy well enough to do so." The released emails nonetheless showed cordial exchanges on a range of topics, including Musk's inquiry about parties on the island. The correspondence also indicated that Musk suggested hosting Epstein at SpaceX, while Epstein separately discussed plans to tour SpaceX and bring "the girls", though there is no evidence that such a visit occurred. Musk has described the release of the files a "distraction", later accusing the second Trump administration of suppressing them to protect powerful individuals, including Trump himself.[l] Wealth Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US$690 billion as of January 2026, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and $852 billion according to Forbes, primarily from his ownership stakes in SpaceX and Tesla. Having been first listed on the Forbes Billionaires List in 2012, around 75% of Musk's wealth was derived from Tesla stock in November 2020, although he describes himself as "cash poor". According to Forbes, he became the first person in the world to achieve a net worth of $300 billion in 2021; $400 billion in December 2024; $500 billion in October 2025; $600 billion in mid-December 2025; $700 billion later that month; and $800 billion in February 2026. In November 2025, a Tesla pay package worth potentially $1 trillion for Musk was approved, which he is to receive over 10 years if he meets specific goals. Public image Although his ventures have been highly influential within their separate industries starting in the 2000s, Musk only became a public figure in the early 2010s. He has been described as an eccentric who makes spontaneous and impactful decisions, while also often making controversial statements, contrary to other billionaires who prefer reclusiveness to protect their businesses. Musk's actions and his expressed views have made him a polarizing figure. Biographer Ashlee Vance described people's opinions of Musk as polarized due to his "part philosopher, part troll" persona on Twitter. He has drawn denouncement for using his platform to mock the self-selection of personal pronouns, while also receiving praise for bringing international attention to matters like British survivors of grooming gangs. Musk has been described as an American oligarch due to his extensive influence over public discourse, social media, industry, politics, and government policy. After Trump's re-election, Musk's influence and actions during the transition period and the second presidency of Donald Trump led some to call him "President Musk", the "actual president-elect", "shadow president" or "co-president". Awards for his contributions to the development of the Falcon rockets include the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics George Low Transportation Award in 2008, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale Gold Space Medal in 2010, and the Royal Aeronautical Society Gold Medal in 2012. In 2015, he received an honorary doctorate in engineering and technology from Yale University and an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Honorary Membership. Musk was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2018.[m] In 2022, Musk was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Time has listed Musk as one of the most influential people in the world in 2010, 2013, 2018, and 2021. Musk was selected as Time's "Person of the Year" for 2021. Then Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal wrote that, "Person of the Year is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too." Notes References Works cited Further reading External links |
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Contents Thirty-seventh government of Israel The thirty-seventh government of Israel is the current cabinet of Israel, formed on 29 December 2022, following the Knesset election the previous month. The coalition government currently consists of five parties — Likud, Shas, Otzma Yehudit, Religious Zionist Party and New Hope — and is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who took office as the prime minister of Israel for the sixth time. The government is widely regarded as the most right-wing government in the country's history, and includes far-right politicians. Several of the government's policy proposals have led to controversies, both within Israel and abroad, with the government's attempts at reforming the judiciary leading to a wave of demonstrations across the country. Following the outbreak of the Gaza war, opposition leader Yair Lapid initiated discussions with Netanyahu on the formation of an emergency government. On 11 October 2023, National Unity MKs Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot, Gideon Sa'ar, Hili Tropper, and Yifat Shasha-Biton joined the Security Cabinet of Israel to form an emergency national unity government. Their accession to the Security Cabinet and to the government (as ministers without portfolio) was approved by the Knesset the following day. Gantz, Netanyahu, and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant became part of the newly formed Israeli war cabinet, with Eisenkot and Ron Dermer serving as observers. National Unity left the government in June 2024. New Hope rejoined the government in September. Otzma Yehudit announced on 19 January 2025 that it had withdrawn from the government, which took effect on 21 January, following the cabinet's acceptance of the three-phase Gaza war ceasefire proposal, though it rejoined two months later. United Torah Judaism left the government in July 2025 over dissatisfaction with the government's draft conscription law. Shas left the government several days later, though it remains part of the coalition. Background The right-wing bloc of parties, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, known in Israel as the national camp, won 64 of the 120 seats in the elections for the Knesset, while the coalition led by the incumbent prime minister Yair Lapid won 51 seats. The new majority has been variously described as the most right-wing government in Israeli history, as well as Israel's most religious government. Shortly after the elections, Lapid conceded to Netanyahu, and congratulated him, wishing him luck "for the sake of the Israeli people". On 15 November, the swearing-in ceremony for the newly elected members of the 25th Knesset was held during the opening session. The vote to appoint a new Speaker of the Knesset, which is usually conducted at the opening session, as well as the swearing in of cabinet members were postponed since ongoing coalition negotiations had not yet resulted in agreement on these positions. Government formation Yair Lapid Yesh Atid Benjamin Netanyahu Likud On 3 November 2022, Netanyahu told his aide Yariv Levin to begin informal coalition talks with allied parties, after 97% of the vote was counted. The leader of the Shas party Aryeh Deri met with Yitzhak Goldknopf, the leader of United Torah Judaism and its Agudat Yisrael faction, on 4 November. The two parties agreed to cooperate as members of the next government. The Degel HaTorah faction of United Torah Judaism stated on 5 November that it will maintain its ideological stance about not seeking any ministerial posts, as per the instruction of its spiritual leader Rabbi Gershon Edelstein, but will seek other senior posts like Knesset committee chairmen and deputy ministers. Netanyahu himself started holding talks on 6 November. He first met with Moshe Gafni, the leader of Degel HaTorah, and then with Goldknopf. Meanwhile, the Religious Zionist Party leader Bezalel Smotrich and the leader of its Otzma Yehudit faction Itamar Ben-Gvir pledged that they would not enter the coalition without the other faction. Gafni later met with Smotrich for coalition talks. Smotrich then met with Netanyahu. On 7 November, Netanyahu met with Ben-Gvir who demanded the Ministry of Public Security with expanded powers for himself and the Ministry of Education or Transport and Road Safety for Yitzhak Wasserlauf. A major demand among all of Netanyahu's allies was that the Knesset be allowed to ignore the rulings of the Supreme Court. Netanyahu met with the Noam faction leader and its sole MK Avi Maoz on 8 November after he threatened to boycott the coalition. He demanded complete control of the Western Wall by the Haredi rabbinate and removal of what he considered as anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish content in schoolbooks. President Isaac Herzog began consultations with heads of all the political parties on 9 November after the election results were certified. During the consultations, he expressed his reservations about Ben-Gvir becoming a member in the next government. Shas met with Likud for coalition talks on 10 November. By 11 November, Netanyahu had secured recommendations from 64 MKs, which constituted a majority. He was given the mandate to form the thirty-seventh government of Israel by President Herzog on 13 November. Otzma Yehudit and Noam officially split from Religious Zionism on 20 November as per a pre-election agreement. On 25 November, Otzma Yehudit and Likud signed a coalition agreement, under which Ben-Gvir will assume the newly created position of National Security Minister, whose powers would be more expansive than that of the Minister of Public Security, including overseeing the Israel Police and the Israel Border Police in the West Bank, as well as giving powers to authorities to shoot thieves stealing from military bases. Yitzhak Wasserlauf was given the Ministry for the Development of the Negev and the Galilee with expanded powers to regulate new West Bank settlements, while separating it from the "Periphery" portfolio, which will be given to Shas. The deal also includes giving the Ministry of Heritage to Amihai Eliyahu, separating it from the "Jerusalem Affairs" portfolio, the chairmanship of the Knesset's Public Security Committee to Zvika Fogel and that of the Special Committee for the Israeli Citizens' Fund to Limor Son Har-Melech, the post of Deputy Economic Minister to Almog Cohen, establishment of a national guard, and expansion of mobilization of reservists in the Border Police. Netanyahu and Maoz signed a coalition agreement on 27 November, under which the latter would become a deputy minister, would head an agency on Jewish identity in the Prime Minister's Office, and would also head Nativ, which processes the aliyah from the former Soviet Union. The agency for Jewish identity would have authority over educational content taught outside the regular curriculum in schools, in addition to the department of the Ministry of Education overseeing external teaching and partnerships, which would bring nonofficial organisations permitted to teach and lecture at schools under its purview. Likud signed a coalition agreement with the Religious Zionist Party on 1 December. Under the deal, Smotrich would serve as the Minister of Finance in rotation with Aryeh Deri, and the party will receive the post of a minister within the Ministry of Defense with control over the departments administering settlement and open lands under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, in addition to another post of a deputy minister. The deal also includes giving the post of Minister of Aliyah and Integration to Ofir Sofer, the newly created National Missions Ministry to Orit Strook, and the chairmanship of the Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee to Simcha Rothman. Likud and United Torah Judaism signed a coalition agreement on 6 December, to allow request for an extension to the deadline. Under it, the party would receive the Ministry of Construction and Housing, the chairmanship of the Knesset Finance Committee which will be given to Moshe Gafni, the Ministry of Jerusalem and Tradition (which would replace the Ministry of Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage), in addition to several posts of deputy ministers and chairmanships of Knesset committees. Likud also signed a deal with Shas by 8 December, securing interim coalition agreements with all of their allies. Under the deal, Deri will first serve as the Minister of Interior and Health, before rotating posts with Smotrich after two years. The party will also receive the Ministry of Religious Services and Welfare Ministries, as well as posts of deputy ministers in the Ministry of Education and Interior. The vote to replace then-incumbent Knesset speaker Mickey Levy was scheduled for 13 December, after Likud and its allies secured the necessary number of signatures for it. Yariv Levin of Likud was elected as an interim speaker by 64 votes, while his opponents Merav Ben-Ari of Yesh Atid and Ayman Odeh of Hadash received 45 and five votes respectively. Netanyahu asked Herzog for a 14-day extension after the agreement with Shas to finalise the roles his allied parties would play. Herzog on 9 December extended the deadline to 21 December. On that date, Netanyahu informed Herzog that he had succeeded in forming a coalition, with the new government expected to be sworn in by 2 January 2023. The government was sworn in on 29 December 2022. Timeline Israeli law stated that people convicted of crimes cannot serve in the government. An amendment to that law was made in late 2022, known colloquially as the Deri Law, to allow those who had been convicted without prison time to serve. This allowed Deri to be appointed to the cabinet. Shas leader Aryeh Deri was appointed to be Minister of Health, Minister of the Interior, and Vice Prime Minister in December 2022. He was fired in January 2023, following a Supreme Court decision that his appointment was unreasonable, since he had been convicted of fraud, and had promised not to seek government roles through a plea deal. In March 2023, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called on the government to delay legislation related to the judicial reform. Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that he had been dismissed from his position, leading to the continuation of mass protests across the country (which had started in January in Tel Aviv). Gallant continued to serve as a minister as he had not received formal notice of dismissal, and two weeks later it was announced that Netanyahu had reversed his decision. Public Safety Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (Otzma Yehudit leader) and Minister of Justice Yariv Levin (Likud) both threatened to resign if the judicial reform was delayed.[better source needed] After the outbreak of the Gaza war, five members of the National Unity party joined the government as ministers without portfolio, with leader Benny Gantz being made a member of the new Israeli war cabinet (along with Netanyahu and Gallant). As the war progressed, minister of national security Itamar Ben-Gvir threatened to leave the government if the war was ended. A month later in mid December, he again threatened to leave if the war did not maintain "full strength". Gideon Sa'ar stated on 16 March that his New Hope party would resign from the government and join the opposition if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not appoint him to the Israeli war cabinet. Netanyahu did not do so, resulting in Sa'ar's New Hope party leaving the government nine days later, reducing the size of the coalition from 76 MKs to 72. Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, of the National Religious Party–Religious Zionism party, have indicated that they will withdraw their parties from the government if the January 2025 Gaza war ceasefire is adopted, which would bring down the government. Ben-Gvir announced on 5 June that the members of his party would be allowed to vote as they wish, though his party resumed support on 9 June. On 18 May, Gantz set an 8 June deadline for withdrawal from the coalition, which was delayed by a day following the 2024 Nuseirat rescue operation. Gantz and his party left the government on 9 June, giving the government 64 seats in the Knesset. Sa'ar and his New Hope party rejoined the Netanyahu government on 30 September, increasing the number of seats held by the government to 68. The High Court of Justice ruled on 28 March 2024 that yeshiva funds would no longer be available for students who are "eligible for enlistment", effectively allowing ultra-Orthodox Jews to be drafted into the IDF. Attorney general Gali Baharav-Miara indicated on 31 March that the conscription process must begin on 1 April. The court ruled on 25 June that the IDF must begin to draft yeshiva students. Likud announced on 7 July that it would not put forward any legislation after Shas and United Torah Judaism said that they would boycott the plenary session over the lack of legislation dealing with the Haredi draft. The Ultra-Orthodox boycott continued for a second day, with UTJ briefly ending its boycott on 9 July to unsuccessfully vote in favor of a bill which would have weakened the Law of Return. Yuli Edelstein, who was replaced by Boaz Bismuth on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in early August, published a draft version of the conscription law shortly before his ouster. Bismuth cancelled the work on the draft law in September 2025, which Edelstein called "a shame." Bismuth released the official version of the draft law in late November 2025. It weakened penalties for draft evaders, with Edelstein saying it was "the exact opposite" of the bill which he attempted to pass. Members of Otzma Yehudit resigned from the government on 19 January 2025 over the January 2025 Gaza war ceasefire, which took effect on 21 January. The members rejoined in March, following the "resumption" of the war in Gaza. Avi Maoz of the Noam party left the government in March 2025. On 4 June 2025, senior rabbis for United Torah Judaism Dov Lando and Moshe Hillel Hirsch instructed the party's MKs to pass a bill which would dissolve the Knesset. Yesh Atid, Yisrael Beytenu and The Democrats announced that they will "submit a bill" for dissolution on 11 June, with Yesh Atid tabling the bill on 4 June. There were also reports that Shas would vote in favor of Knesset dissolution amidst division within the governing coalition on Haredi conscription. This jeopardized the coalition's majority and would have triggered new elections if the bill passed. The following day, Agudat Yisrael, one of the United Torah Judaism factions, confirmed that it would submit a bill to dissolve the Knesset. Asher Medina, a Shas spokesman, indicated on 9 June that the party would vote in favor of a preliminary bill to dissolve the Knesset. The rabbis of Degel HaTorah instructed the parties' MKs on 12 June 2025 to oppose the dissolution of the Knesset, which was followed by Yuli Edelstein and the Shas and Degel HaTorah parties announcing that a deal had been reached, with "rabbinical leaders" telling their parties to delay the dissolution vote by a week. Shas and Degel HaTorah voted against the dissolution bill, which led to the bill failing its preliminary reading in a vote of 61 against and 53 in favor. MKs Ya'akov Tessler and Moshe Roth of Agudat Yisrael voted in favor of dissolution. Another dissolution bill will be unable to be brought forward for six months. If the bill had passed its preliminary reading, in addition to three more readings, an election would have been held in approximately three months; The Jerusalem Post posited it would have been held in October. Degel HaTorah announced on 14 July 2025 that it would leave the government because members of the party were dissatisfied after viewing the proposed draft bill by Yuli Edelstein regarding Haredi exemptions from the Israeli draft. Several hours later, Agudat Yisrael announced that it would also leave the government. Deputy Transportation Minister Uri Maklev, Moshe Gafni, the head of the Knesset Finance Committee, Ya'akov Asher, the head of the Knesset Interior and Environment Protection Committee and Jerusalem Affairs minister Meir Porush all submitted their resignations, with their resignations taking effect in 48 hours. Sports Minister Ya'akov Tessler and "Special Committee for Public Petitions Chair" Yitzhak Pindrus also submitted resignations. Yisrael Eichler submitted his resignation as the "head of the Knesset Labor and Welfare Committee" the same day. The resignations will leave Netanyahu's government with a 60-seat majority in the Knesset, as Avi Maoz, of the Noam party, left the government in March 2025. Despite Edelstein's ouster in August, a spokesman for UTJ head Yitzhak Goldknopf remarked that it would not change the faction's withdrawal from the government. The religious council for Shas, called the Moetzet Chachmei HaTorah, instructed the party on 16 July to leave the government, but stay in the coalition. The following day, various cabinet ministers submitted their resignations, including "Interior Minister Moshe Arbel, Social Affairs Minister Ya'akov Margi and Religious Services Minister Michael Malchieli." Malchieli reportedly has postponed his resignation so he could attend a 20 July meeting of the panel investigating whether attorney general Gali Baharav-Miara should be dismissed. Deputy Minister of Agriculture Moshe Abutbul, Minister of Health Uriel Buso and Haim Biton, a minister in the Education Ministry, also submitted their resignation letters, while Arbel retracted his resignation letter. The last cabinet member from the party to submit it was Labor Minister Yoav Ben-Tzur. The ministers who resigned will return to the Knesset, replacing MKs Moshe Roth, Yitzhak Pindrus and Eliyahu Baruchi. Members of government Listed below are the current ministers in the government: Principles and priorities According to the agreements signed between Likud and each of its coalition partners, and the incoming government's published guideline principles, its stated priorities are to combat the cost of living, further centralize Orthodox control over the state religious services, pass judicial reforms which include legislation to reduce judicial controls on executive and legislative power, expand settlements in the West Bank, and consider an annexation of the West Bank. Before the vote of confidence in his new government in the Knesset, Netanyahu presented three top priorities for the new government: internal security and governance, halting the nuclear program of Iran, and the development of infrastructure, with a focus on further connecting the center of the country with its periphery. Policies The government's flagship program, centered around reforms in the judicial branch, drew widespread criticism. Critics said it would have negative effects on the separation of powers, the office of the Attorney General, the economy, public health, women and minorities, workers' rights, scientific research, the overall strength of Israel's democracy and its foreign relations. After weeks of public protests on Israel's streets, joined by a growing number of military reservists, Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant spoke against the reform on 25 March, calling for a halt of the legislative process "for the sake of Israel's security". The next day, Netanyahu announced that he would be removed from his post, sparking another wave of protest across Israel and ultimately leading to Netanyahu agreeing to pause the legislation. On 10 April, Netanyahu announced that Gallant would keep his post. On 27 March 2023, after the public protests and general strikes, Netanyahu announced a pause in the reform process to allow for dialogue with opposition parties. However, negotiations aimed at reaching a compromise collapsed in June, and the government resumed its plans to unilaterally pass parts of the legislation. On 24 July 2023, the Knesset passed a bill that curbs the power of the Supreme Court to declare government decisions unreasonable; on 1 January 2024, the Supreme Court struck the bill down. The Knesset passed a "watered-down" version of the judicial reform package in late March 2025 which "changes the composition" of the judicial selection committee. In December 2022 Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir sought to amend the law that regulates the operations of the Israel Police, such that the ministry will have more direct control of its forces and policies, including its investigative priorities. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara objected to the draft proposal, raising concerns that the law would enable the politicization of police work, and the draft was amended to partially address those concerns. Nevertheless, in March 2023 Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon stated that the Attorney General's fears had been realized, referring to several instances of ministerial involvement in the day-to-day work of the otherwise independent police force – statements that were repeated by the Attorney General herself two days later. Separately, Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai instructed Deputy Commissioners to avoid direct communication with the minister, later stating that "the Israel Police will remain apolitical, and act only according to law". Following appeals by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, the High Court of Justice instructed Ben-Gvir "to refrain from giving operational directions to the police... [especially] as regards to protests and demonstrations against the government." As talks of halting the judicial reform gained wind during March 2023, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir threatened to resign if the legislation implementing the changes was suspended. To appease Ben-Gvir, Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that the government would promote the creation of a new National Guard, to be headed by Ben-Gvir. On 29 March, thousands of Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem against this decision. On 1 April, the New York Times quoted Gadeer Nicola, head of the Arab department at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, as saying "If this thing passes, it will be an imminent danger to the rights of Arab citizens in this country. This will create two separate systems of applying the law. The regular police which will operate against Jewish citizens — and a militarized militia to deal only with Arab citizens." The same day, while speaking on Israel's Channel 13 about those whom he'd like to see enlist in the National Guard, Ben-Gvir specifically mentioned La Familia, the far-right fan club of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team. On 2 April, Israel's cabinet approved the establishment of a law enforcement body that would operate independently of the police, under Ben-Gvir's authority. According to the decision, the Minister was to establish a committee chaired by the Director General of the Ministry of National Security, with representatives of the ministries of defense, justice and finance, as well as the police and the IDF, to outline the operations of the new organization. The committee's recommendations will be submitted to the government for consideration. Addressing a conference on 4 April, Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai said that he is not opposed to the establishment of a security body which would answer to the police, but "a separate body? Absolutely not." The police chief said he had warned Ben-Gvir that the establishment of a security body separate from the police is "unnecessary, with extremely high costs that may harm citizens' personal security." During a press conference on 10 April, Prime Minister Netanyahu said, in what has been seen by some news outlets as a concession to the protesters, that "This will not be anyone's militia, it will be a security body, orderly, professional, that will be subordinate to one of the [existing] security bodies." The committee established by the government recommended the government to order the establishment of the National Guard immediately while allocating budgets. The National Guard, under whose command will be a superintendent of the police, will not be subordinate to Ben-Gvir. It will be subordinate to the police commissioner and will be part of Israel Border Police. The Ministry of Defense and Finance opposed the conclusions. The Israeli National Security Council called for further discussion on this. The coalition's efforts to expand the purview of Rabbinical courts; force some organizations, such as hospitals, to enforce certain religious practices; amend the Law Prohibiting Discrimination to allow gender segregation and discrimination on the grounds of religious belief; expand funding for religious causes; and put into law the exemption of yeshiva and kolel students from conscription have drawn criticism. According to the Haaretz op-ed of 7 March 2023, "the current coalition is interested... in modifying the public space so it suits the religious lifestyle. The legal coup is meant to castrate anyone who can prevent it, most of all the HCJ." Several banks and institutional investors, including the Israel Discount Bank and AIG have committed to avoid investing in, or providing credit to any organization that will discriminate against others on ground of religion, race, gender or sexual orientation. A series of technology companies and investment firms including Wiz, Intel Israel, Salesforce and Microsoft Israel Research and Development, have criticized the proposed changes to the Law Prohibiting Discrimination, with Wiz stating that it will require its suppliers to commit to preventing discrimination. Over sixty prominent law firms pledged that they will neither represent, nor do business with discriminating individuals and organizations. Insight Partners, a major private equity fund operating in Israel, released a statement warning against intolerance and any attempt to harm personal liberties. Orit Lahav, chief executive of the women's rights organization Mavoi Satum ("Dead End"), said that "the Rabbinical courts are the most discriminatory institution in the State of Israel... Limiting the HCJ[d] while expanding the jurisdiction of the Rabbinical courts would... cause significant harm to women." Anat Thon Ashkenazy, Director of the Center for Democratic Values and Institutions at the Israel Democracy Institute, said that "almost every part of the reform could harm women... the meaning of an override clause is that even if the court says that the law on gender segregation is illegitimate, is harmful, the Knesset could say 'Okay, we say otherwise'". She added that "there is a very broad institutional framework here, after which there will come legislation that harms women's right and we will have no way of protecting or stopping it." During July 2023, 20 professional medical associations signed a letter of position warning against the ramifications to public health that would result from the exclusion of women from the public sphere. They cited, among others, a rise in prevalence of risk factors for cardiovascular disease, pregnancy-related ailments, psychological distress, and the risk of suicide. On 30 July the Knesset passed an amendment to penal law adding sexual offenses to those offenses whose penalty can be doubled if done on grounds of "nationalistic terrorism, racism or hostility towards a certain community". According to MK Limor Son Har-Melech, the bill is meant to penalize any individual who "[intends to] harm a woman sexually based on her Jewishness". The law was criticized by MK Gilad Kariv as "populist, nationalistic, and dangerous towards the Arab citizens of Israel", and by MK Ahmad Tibi as a "race law", and was objected to by legal advisors at the Ministry of Justice and the Knesset Committee on National Security. Activist Orit Kamir wrote that "the amendment... is neither feminist, equal, nor progressive, but the opposite: it subordinates women's sexuality to the nationalistic, racist patriarchy. It hijacks the Law for Prevention of Sexual Harassment to serve a world view that tags women as sexual objects that personify the nation's honor." Yael Sherer, director of the Lobby to Combat Sexual Violence, criticized the law as being informed by dated ideas about sexual assault, and proposed that MKs "dedicate a session... to give victims of sexual assault an opportunity to come out of the darkness... instead of [submitting] declarative bills that change nothing and are not meant but for grabbing headlines". In Israel, during 2022, 24 women "were murdered because they were women," which was an increase of 50% compared to 2021. A law permitting courts to order men subject to a restraining order following domestic violence offenses to wear electronic tags was drafted during the previous Knesset and had passed its first reading unanimously. On 22 March 2023, the Knesset voted to reject the bill. It had been urged to do so by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who said that the bill was unfair to men. Earlier in the week, Ben-Gvir had blocked the measure from advancing in the ministerial legislative committee. The MKs voting against the bill included Prime Minister Netanyahu. The Association of Families of Murder Victims said that by rejecting the law, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir "brings joy to violent men and abandons the women threatened with murder… unsupervised restraining orders endanger women's lives even more. They give women the illusion of being protected, and then they are murdered." MK Pnina Tamano-Shata, chairwoman of the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, said that "the coalition proved today that it despises women's lives." The NGO Amutat Bat Melech [he], which assists Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox women who suffer from domestic violence, said that: "Rejecting the electronic bracelet bill is disconnected from the terrible reality of seven femicides since the beginning of the year. This is an effective tool of the first degree that could have saved lives and reduced the threat to women suffering from domestic violence. This is a matter of life and death, whose whole purpose is to provide a solution to defend women." The agreement signed by the coalition parties includes the setting up of a committee to draft changes to the Law of Return. Israeli religious parties have long demanded that the "grandchild clause" of the Law of Return be cancelled. This clause grants citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, as long as they do not practice another religion. If the grandchild clause were to be removed from the Law of Return then around 3 million people who are currently eligible for aliyah would no longer be eligible. The heads of the Jewish Agency, the Jewish Federations of North America, the World Zionist Organization and Keren Hayesod sent a joint letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, expressing their "deep concern" about any changes to the Law of Return, adding that "Any change in the delicate and sensitive status quo on issues such as the Law of Return or conversion could threaten to unravel the ties between us and keep us away from each other." The Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Zionist Federation of Australia issued a joint statement saying "We… view with deep concern… proposals in relation to religious pluralism and the law of return that risk damaging Israel's… relationship with Diaspora Jewry." On 19 March 2023, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich spoke in Paris at a memorial service for a Likud activist. The lectern at which Smotrich spoke was covered with a flag depicting the 'Greater Land of Israel,' encompassing the whole of Mandatory Palestine, as well as Trans-Jordan. During his speech, Smotrich said that "there's no such thing as Palestinians because there's no such thing as a Palestinian people." He added that the Palestinian people are a fictitious nation invented only to fight the Zionist movement, asking "Is there a Palestinian history or culture? There isn't any." The event received widespread media coverage. On 21 March, a spokesman for the US State Department sharply criticized Smotrich's comments. "The comments, which were delivered at a podium adorned with an inaccurate and provocative map, are offensive, they are deeply concerning, and, candidly, they're dangerous. The Palestinians have a rich history and culture, and the United States greatly values our partnership with the Palestinian people," he said. The Jordanian Foreign Ministry also voiced disapproval: "The Israeli Minister of Finance's use, during his participation in an event held yesterday in Paris, of a map of Israel that includes the borders of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the occupied Palestinian territories represents a reckless inflammatory act, and a violation of international norms and the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty." Additionally, a map encompassing Mandatory Palestine and Trans-Jordan with a Jordanian flag on it was placed on a central lectern in the Jordanian Parliament. Jordan's parliament voted to expel the Israeli ambassador. Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a clarification relating to the matter, stating that "Israel is committed to the 1994 peace agreement with Jordan. There has been no change in the position of the State of Israel, which recognizes the territorial integrity of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan". Ahead of a Europe Day event due to take place on 9 May 2023, far-right wing National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was assigned as a representative of the government and a speaker at the event by the government secretariat, which deals with placing ministers at receptions on the occasion of the national days of the foreign embassies. The European Union requested that Ben-Gvir not attend, but the government did not make changes to the plan. On 8 May, the European delegation to Israel cancelled the reception, stating that: "The EU Delegation to Israel is looking forward to celebrating Europe Day on May 9, as it does every year. Regrettably, this year we have decided to cancel the diplomatic reception, as we do not want to offer a platform to someone whose views contradict the values the European Union stands for. However, the Europe Day cultural event for the Israeli public will be maintained to celebrate with our friends and partners in Israel the strong and constructive bilateral relationship". Israel's Opposition Leader Yair Lapid stated: "Sending Itamar Ben-Gvir to a gathering of EU ambassadors is a serious professional mistake. The government is embarrassing a large group of friendly countries, jeopardizing future votes in international institutions, and damaging our foreign relations. Last year, after a decade of efforts, we succeeded in signing an economic-political agreement with the European Union that will contribute to the Israeli economy and our foreign relations. Why risk it, and for what? Ben-Gvir is not a legitimate person in the international community (and not really in Israel either), and sometimes you have to be both wise and just and simply send someone else". On 23 February 2023, Defense Minister Gallant signed an agreement assigning governmental powers in the West Bank to a body to be headed by Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who will effectively become the governor of the West Bank, controlling almost all areas of life in the area, including planning, building and infrastructure. Israeli governments have hitherto been careful to keep the occupation as a military government. The temporary holding of power by an occupying military force, pending a negotiated settlement, is a principle of international law – an expression of the prohibition against obtaining sovereignty through conquest that was introduced in the wake of World War II. An editorial in Haaretz noted that the assignment of governmental powers in the West Bank to a civilian governor, alongside the plan to expand the dual justice system so that Israeli law will apply fully to settlers in the West Bank, constitutes de jure annexation of the West Bank. On 26 February 2023, following the 2023 Huwara shooting in which two Israelis were killed by an unidentified attacker, hundreds of Israeli settlers attacked the Palestinian town of Huwara and three nearby villages, setting alight hundreds of Palestinian homes (some with people in them), businesses, a school, and numerous vehicles, killing one Palestinian man and injuring 100 others. Bezalel Smotrich subsequently called on Twitter for Huwara to be "wiped out" by the Israeli government. Zvika Fogel MK, of the ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit, which forms part of the governing coalition, said that he "looks very favorably upon" the results of the rampage. Members of the coalition proposed an amendment to the Disengagement Law, which would allow Israelis to resettle settlements vacated during the 2005 Israeli disengagement from Gaza and the northern West Bank. The evacuated settlements were considered illegal under international law, according to most countries. The proposal was approved for voting by the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on 9 March 2023, while the committee was still waiting for briefing materials from the NSS, IDF, MFA and Shin Bet, and was passed on 21 March. The US has requested clarification from Israeli ambassador Michael Herzog. A US State Department spokesman stated that "The U.S. strongly urges Israel to refrain from allowing the return of settlers to the area covered by the legislation, consistent with both former Prime Minister Sharon and the current Israeli Government's commitment to the United States," noting that the actions represent a clear violation of undertakings given by the Sharon government to the Bush administration in 2005 and Netanyahu's far-right coalition to the Biden administration the previous week. Minister of Communication Shlomo Karhi had initially intended to cut the funding of the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (also known by its blanket branding Kan) by 400 million shekels – roughly half of its total budget – closing several departments, and privatizing content creation. In response, the Director-General of the European Broadcasting Union, Noel Curran, sent two urgent letters to Netanyahu, expressing his concerns and calling on the Israeli government to "safeguard the independence of our Member KAN and ensure it is allowed to operate in a sustainable way, with funding that is both stable, adequate, fair, and transparent." On 25 January 2023, nine journalist organizations representing some of Kan's competitors issued a statement of concern, acknowledging the "important contribution of public broadcasting in creating a worthy, unbiased and non-prejudicial journalistic platform", and noting that "the existence of the [broadcasting] corporation as a substantial public broadcast organization strengthens media as a whole, adding to the competition in the market rather than weakening it." They also expressed their concern that the "real reason" for the proposal was actually "an attempt to silence voices from which... [the Minister] doesn't always draw satisfaction". The same day, hundreds of journalists, actors and filmmakers protested in Tel Aviv. The proposal was eventually put on hold. On 22 February 2023 it was reported that Prime Minister Netanyahu was attempting to appoint his close associate Yossi Shelley as the deputy to the National Statistician — a highly sensitive position in charge of providing accurate data for decision makers. The appointment of Shelley, who did not possess the required qualifications for the role, was withdrawn following publication. In its daily editorial, Haaretz tied this attempt with the judicial reform: "once they take control of the judiciary, law enforcement and public media, they wish to control the state's data base, the dry numerical data it uses to plan its future". Netanyahu also proposed Avi Simhon for the role, and eventually froze all appointments at the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. Also on 22 February 2023, it was revealed that Yoav Kish, the Minister of Education, was promoting a draft government decision change to the National Library of Israel board of directors which would grant him more power over the institution. In response, the Hebrew University — which owned the library until 2008 – announced that if the draft is accepted, it will withdraw its collections from the library. The university's collections, which according to the university constitute some 80% of the library's collection, include the Agnon archive, the original manuscript of Hatikvah, and the Rothschild Haggadah, the oldest known Haggadah. A group of 300 authors and poets signed an open letter against the move, further noting their objection against "political takeover" of public broadcasting, as well as "any legislation that will castrate the judiciary and damage the democratic foundations of the state of Israel". Several days later, it was reported that a series of donors decided to withhold their donations to the library, totaling some 80 million shekels. On 3 March a petition against the move by 1,500 academics, including Israel Prize laureates, was sent to Kish. The proposal has been seen by some as retribution against Shai Nitzan, the former State Attorney and the library's current rector. On 5 March it was reported that the Legal Advisor to the Ministry of Finance, Asi Messing, was withholding the proposal. According to Messing, the proposal – which was being promoted as part of the Economic Arrangements Law – "was not reviewed... by the qualified personnel in the Ministry of Finance, does not align with any of the common goals of the economic plan, was not agreed to by myself and was not approved by the Attorney General." As of February 2023, the government has been debating several proposals that will significantly weaken the Ministry of Environmental Protection, including reducing the environmental regulation of planning and development and electricity production. One of the main proposals, the transferal of a 3 billion shekel fund meant to finance waste management plants from the Ministry of Environmental Protection to the Ministry of the Interior, was eventually withdrawn. The Minister of Environmental Protection, Idit Silman, has been criticized for using for meeting with climate change denialists, for wasteful and personally-motivated travel on the ministry's expense, for politicizing the role, and for engaging in political activity on the ministry's time. The government has been noted for an unusually high number of dismissals and resignations of senior career civil servants, and for the frequent attempts to replace them with candidates with known political associations, who are often less competent. According to sources, Netanyahu and people in his vicinity are seeking out civil servants who were appointed by the previous government, intent on replacing them with people loyal to him. Governmental nominees for various positions have been criticized for lack of expertise. In addition to the nominee to the position of Deputy National Statistician (see above), the Director General of the Ministry of Finance, Shlomi Heisler; the Director General of the Ministry of Justice, Itamar Donenfeld; and the Director General of Ministry of Transport, Moshe Ben Zaken, have all been criticized for incompetence, lack of familiarity with their Ministries' subject matter, lack of interest in the job, or lack of experience in managing large organizations. It has been reported that in some ministries, senior officials were enacting slowdowns as a means for dealing with the new ministers and director generals. On 28 July the director general of the Ministry of Education resigned, citing as reason the societal "rift". Asaf Zalel, a retired Air Force Brigadier General, was appointed in January. When asked about attempts to appoint his personal friend and attorney to the board of directors of a state-owned company, Minister David Amsalem replied: "that is my job, due to my authority to appoint directors. I put forward people that I know and hold in esteem". Under Minister of Transport Miri Regev, the ministry has either dismissed or lost the heads of the National Public Transport Authority, Israel Airports Authority, National Road Safety Authority, Israel Railways, and several officials in Netivei Israel. The current chair of Netivei Israel is Likud member and Regev associate Yigal Amadi, and the legal counsel is Einav Abuhzira, daughter of a former Likud branch chair. Abuhzira was appointed instead of Elad Berdugo, nephew of Netanyahu surrogate Yaakov Bardugo, after he was disqualified for the role by the Israel Government Companies Authority. In July 2023 the Ministry of Communications, Shlomo Karhi, and the minister in charge of the Israel Government Companies Authority, Dudi Amsalem, deposed the chair of the Israel Postal Company, Michael Vaknin. The chair, who was hired to lead the company's financial recovery after years of operational loss and towards privatization, has gained the support of officials at the Authority and at the Ministry of Finance; nevertheless, the ministers claimed that his performance is inadequate, and nominated in his place Yiftah Ron-Tal, who has known ties to Netanyahu and Smotrich. They also nominated four new directors, two of which have known political associations, and a third who was a witness in Netanyahu's trial. The coalition is allowed to spend a portion of the state's budget on a discretionary basis, meant to coax member parties to reach an agreement on the budget. As of May 2023, the government was pushing an allocation of over 13 billion shekels over two years - almost seven times the amount allocated by the previous government. Most of the funds will be allocated for uses associated with the religious, orthodox and settler communities. The head of the Budget Department at the Ministry of Finance, Yoav Gardos, objected to the allocations, claiming they would exacerbate unemployment in the Orthodox community, which is projected to cost the economy a total of 6.7 trillion shekels in lost produce by 2065. At the onset of the Gaza war and the declaration of a state of national emergency, Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich instructed government agencies to continue with the planned distribution of discretionary funds. Corruption During March 2023, the government was promoting an amendment to the Law on Public Service (Gifts) that would allow Netanyahu to receive donations to fund his legal defense. The amendment follows a decision by the High Court of Justice (HCJ) that forced Netanyahu to refund US$270,000 given to him and his wife by his late cousin, Nathan Mileikowsky, for their legal defense. This is in contrast to past statements by Minister of Justice Yariv Levin, who spoke against the possible conflict of interests that can result from such transactions. The bill was opposed by the Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, who stressed that it could "create a real opportunity for governmental corruption", and was eventually withdrawn at the end of March. As of March 2023, the coalition was promoting a bill that would prevent judicial review of ministerial appointments. The bill is intended to prevent the HCJ from reviewing the appointment of the twice-convicted chairman of Shas, Aryeh Deri (convicted of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust), to a ministerial position, after his previous appointment was annulled on grounds of unreasonableness. The bill follows on the heels of another amendment, that relaxed the ban on the appointment of convicted criminals, so that Deri - who was handed a suspended sentence after his second conviction - could be appointed. The bill is opposed by the Attorney General, as well as by the Knesset Legal Adviser, Sagit Afik. Israeli law allows for declaring a Prime Minister (as well as several other high-ranking public officials) to be temporarily or permanently incapacitated, but does not specify the conditions which can lead to a declaration of incapacitation. In the case of the Prime Minister, the authority to do so is given to the Attorney General. In March 2023, the coalition advanced a bill that passes this authority from the Attorney General to the government with the approval of the Knesset committee, and clarified that incapacitation can only result from medical or mental conditions. On 3 January 2024, the Supreme Court ruled by a majority of 6 out of 11 that the validity of the law will be postponed to the next Knesset because the bill in its immediate application is a personal law and is intended to serve a distinct personal purpose. Later, the court rejected a petition regarding the definition of Netanyahu as an incapacitated prime minister due to his ongoing trial and conflict of interests. Notes References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory_of_the_Levant] | [TOKENS: 2697] |
Contents Prehistory of the Levant The prehistory of the Levant includes the various cultural changes that occurred, as revealed by archaeological evidence, prior to recorded traditions in the area of the Levant. Archaeological evidence suggests that Homo sapiens and other hominid species originated in Africa (see hominid dispersal) and that one of the routes taken to colonize Eurasia was through the Sinai Peninsula desert and the Levant, which means that this is one of the most occupied locations in the history of the Earth. Not only have many cultures lived here, but also many species of the genus Homo. In addition, this region is one of the centers for the development of agriculture. Impact of location, climate, routes Geographically, the area is divided between a coastal plain, the hill country to the east, and the Jordan Valley joining the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea. Rainfall decreases from the north to the south, with the result that the northern region has generally been more economically developed than the southern one.[citation needed] At the latest from the Neolithic period onwards, the area's location at the center of three trade routes linking three continents made it the meeting place for religious and cultural influences from Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor: The area seems to have suffered from acute periods of desiccation and reduced rainfall, influencing the relative importance of settled versus nomadic ways of living. The cycle seems to have been repeated, during which a reduced rainfall increases periods of fallow, with farmers spending increasing amounts of time with their flocks and away from cultivation. Eventually, they revert fully to nomadism. When rainfall increases, they settle around important water sources and increase cultivation. Increased prosperity leads to a revival of inter-regional and, eventually, international trade. The growth of villages rapidly proceeds to the increased prosperity of market towns and city-states, which attract the attention of neighbouring great powers, who may invade to capture control of regional trade networks and possibilities for tribute and taxation. Warfare leads to opening the region to pandemics, with resultant depopulation, overuse of fragile soils and a reversion to nomadic pastoralism.[citation needed] Palaeolithic period (1,850,000 - 20,000 years ago) The earliest traces of the human occupation in the Levant are documented in Ubeidiya in the Jordan Valley of the Southern Levant. The site was dated to c. 1.4 million years ago, but further research has fixed its chronological context to 1.5–1.2 million years ago. The site yielded stone tools typical of the Acheulean industry which appears in East Africa as early as c. 1.76 million years ago. An earlier site is found in Dmanisi, Georgia, dated to 1.85–1.78 million years ago suggest the existence of other sites in the Levant which are yet to be found. Stone tools of the Oldowan industry, preceding the Acheulian, were found in the Negev and Syrian deserts and support the presence of pre-Acheulian cultures in the Levantine corridor, but their chronological context cannot be determined. Ubeidiya prehistoric site is an open site that existed alongside the extinct Lake Ubeidiya whose shores were inhabited by over a hundred Asian and African animal species including mammals such as giraffes, Syrian elephants, Persian fallow deer, mountain and Dorcas gazelles, and the now-extinct pelorovis; birds; reptiles; amphibians; and insects. Some of these animals have been hunted by hominins who inhabited the site, as evidenced by the cut marks observed on the fossilized bones. The stone tools found in Ubeidiya include hand axes, picks, chopping tools, and spheroids. These tools have been attested to the Early Acheulian industry. The tools show a preference for specific rock types such as basalt, limestone and flint for particular tool types. This implies a sophisticated understanding of raw materials by the hominins who located and selected them for production. Other stone tool assemblages in the Levant have been attested to the early Acheulean but lack sufficient dating evidence to compare with Ubeidiya's finds. These sites include Abbassia near the Nile, Evron Quarry and Zihor in Israel and al-Lataminah in Syria. North of Ubeidiya is the crucial site of Daughters of Jacob Bridge (Gesher Benot Ya'akov, abbreviated as "GBY") dated to slightly after c. 790,000 years ago. The stone tool assemblage belongs to the "Large Flake" stage of the Acheulian, testifying to an advanced knapping technique. GBY provides information on many aspects of the life of its inhabitants: Many large mammal bones were found at the site, including those of the elephant Palaeoloxodon recki display evidence of butchery by the early humans. Nuts and tools used to crack them, as well as fish bones, were collected. The earliest wooden artifact - a plank with evidence of polishing - was found at the site and one of the earliest traces of fire use. In some layers, the organization of living space was observed, with certain activities limited to specific areas at the site. The late stage of the Acheulian industry is observed in thousands of sites and find spots in the Middle East, though only a few were excavated. Most of the sites did not yield enough datable evidence. The site at Lake Ram in the Golan Heights was dated based on the basalt flows below and above to an unknown timespan between c. 800,000–233,000 years ago. More accurate dates from Ma'ayan Baruch and the Revadim Quarry in Israel provide the timeframe of c. 500,000–400,000 years ago. Late Acheulian sites and finds are found spread all across the regions of the Levant, including the desert regions from prehistoric Arabia, such as areas in modern-day Saudi Arabia and Jordan, primarily associated with oases, as well as the coastal plains and rift valleys of Israel, Lebanon and Syria. This distribution of sites in various regions of different conditions indicates either a more suitable climate in this period (the Chibanian stage of the Pleistocene) or alternatively better human adapting skills. The earliest cave sites also appear in this stage. Unlike the earlier Acheulian industries in the Levant, flint is the primary material used for tool making, with the handaxe being the primary tool. The toolmakers developed different variants of handaxes different in shape and function, which replaced other tools such as cleavers. Some of the most significant assemblages of stone tools are found in Nadaouiyeh (in central Syria), Tabun, Um Qatafa and Ma'ayan Baruch (in Israel). These sites yield an enormous amount of stone tools, reaching several thousands. An important discovery from Lake Ram is a stone pebble with evidence of artificial shaping and polishing, which resembles the body of a woman and thus serves as one of the earliest figurines known. The Middle Paleolithic (c. 250,000 – c. 48,000 BCE) is represented in the Levant by the Mousterian, known from numerous sites (both caves and open-air sites) through the region. The chronological subdivision of the Mousterian is based on the stratigraphic sequence of the Tabun Cave. Middle Paleolithic human remains include both the Neandertals (Kebara, Amud and Tabun caves) and the anatomically modern humans (Misliya, Skhul, Qafzeh and Manot caves). The Upper Palaeolithic period is dated in the Levant to c. 48,000 – c. 20,000 BCE. Epi-Palaeolithic period (20,000 - 9,500 BCE) The Epipalaeolithic period (c. 20,000 – c. 9,500 cal. BCE; also known as Mesolithic period) is characterized by significant cultural variability and wide spread of the microlithic technologies. Beginning with the appearance of the Kebaran culture (18,000–12,500 BCE) a microlithic toolkit was associated with the appearance of the bow and arrow into the area. Kebaran shows affinities with the earlier Helwan phase in the Egyptian Fayyum, and may be associated with a movement of people across the Sinai associated with the climatic warming after the Late Glacial Maxima of 20,000 BCE. Kebaran affiliated cultures spread as far as Southern Turkey. The latest part of the period (c. 12,500 – c. 9,500 cal. BCE) is the time of flourishing of the Natufian culture and development of sedentism among the hunter-gatherers. This culture existed from about 13,000 to 9,800 BCE in the Levant. Numerous archaeological excavations have led to a relatively well defined understanding of these people. Two of the most significant aspects of this culture were their large community sizes and their sedentary lifestyles. Although the Late Natufian experienced a slight reversal in this trend (possibly a result of the cold period known as the Younger Dryas) as their community size shrank and they became more nomadic, it is believed that this culture continued through and was the foundation for the Neolithic Revolution. Neolithic period The Neolithic is traditionally divided to the Pre-Pottery (A and B) and Pottery Late Neolithic phases. Pre-Pottery Neolithic A developed from the earlier Natufian cultures of the area. This is the time of the Neolithic Revolution and development of agriculture in West Asia, and the region's first known megaliths (and Earth's oldest known megalith, other than Göbekli Tepe, which is in the Northern Levant and from an unknown culture) with a burial chamber and tracking of the sun or other stars.[citation needed] In addition, the Levant in the Neolithic (and later, in the Chalcolithic) was involved in large scale, far reaching trade. Trade on an impressive scale and covering large distances continued during the Chalcolithic (c. 4500–3300 BCE). Obsidian found in the Chalcolithic levels at what is now Gilat in Israel have had their origins traced via elemental analysis to three sources in southern Anatolia: Hotamış Dağ, Mount Göllü, and as far east as Mount Nemrut, 500 km (310 mi) east of the other two sources. This indicates a vast trade circle reaching as far as the northern Fertile Crescent at these three Anatolian sites. The Ghassulian created the basis of the Mediterranean economy, which has characterized the area ever since. A Chalcolithic culture, the Ghassulian economy was a mixed agricultural system consisting of extensive cultivation of wheat and barley, intensive horticulture of vegetable crops, commercial production of vines and olives, and a combination of transhumance and nomadic pastoralism. The Ghassulian culture, according to Juris Zarins, developed out of the earlier Munhata phase of what he calls the "circum-Arabian nomadic pastoral complex", probably associated with the first appearance of ancient Semitic-speaking peoples in this area. Bronze Age The urban development of Canaan lagged considerably behind that of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and even that of Syria, where from 3500 BCE, a sizable city developed at Hamoukar. This city, which was conquered, probably by people coming from the Lower Mesopotamian city of Uruk, saw the first connections between Syria and Lower Mesopotamia that some have suggested lying behind the Biblical Patriarchs. Urban development again began culminating in Early Bronze Age sites like Ebla, which by 2300 BCE, was incorporated once again into the empires of Sargon and Naram-Sin of Akkad. The archives of Ebla show reference to several Biblical sites, including Hazor, Jerusalem, and several people have claimed, also to Sodom and Gomorrah. The collapse of the Akkadian Empire saw the arrival of peoples using Khirbet Kerak Syro-Palestinian pottery ware which originated from the Zagros Mountains east of the Tigris. It is suspected by some Ur seals that this event marks the arrival in Syria and Palestine of the Hurrians, people later known in the Biblical tradition as Horites.[citation needed] The following Middle Bronze Age period was initiated by the arrival of Amorites from Syria in Lower Mesopotamia. This period saw the pinnacle of urban development in Syria and Palestine. Archaeologists show that the chief state at this time was the city of Hazor, the head of all the Canaanite kingdoms of the northern region of Palestine. This is also the period in which ancient Semitic-speaking peoples began to appear in more significant numbers in the Nile Delta. Timeline See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ofcom] | [TOKENS: 4757] |
Contents Ofcom The Office of Communications (Ofcom) is the government-approved regulatory and competition authority for the broadcasting, internet, telecommunications and postal industries of the United Kingdom. Ofcom has wide-ranging powers across the television, radio, telecoms, internet and postal sectors. It has a statutory duty to represent the interests of citizens and consumers by promoting competition and protecting the public from harmful or offensive material. Some of the main areas Ofcom regulates are TV and radio standards, broadband and phones, video-sharing platforms online, the wireless spectrum and postal services. The regulator was initially established by the Office of Communications Act 2002 (c. 11) and received its full authority from the Communications Act 2003 (c. 21). History On 20 June 2001, the Queen's Speech to the UK Parliament announced the creation of Ofcom. The new body, which was to replace several existing authorities, was conceived as a "super-regulator" to oversee media channels that were rapidly converging through digital transmission. On 29 December 2003, Ofcom launched, formally inheriting the duties that had previously been the responsibility of five different regulators: In July 2009, Conservative Party opposition leader David Cameron referenced Ofcom in a speech against the proliferation of quangos: With a Conservative government, Ofcom as we know it will cease to exist… Its remit will be restricted to its narrow technical and enforcement roles. It will no longer play a role in making policy. And the policy-making functions it has today will be transferred back fully to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Under Cameron's subsequent premiership of the 2010 UK coalition government, the Public Bodies Act 2011 did remove or modify several of Ofcom's duties, although it did not substantially reduce Ofcom's remit. On 1 October 2011, Ofcom took over responsibility for regulating the postal services industry from the Postal Services Commission (Postcomm). In April 2015, Ofcom announced that telephone companies would have to provide customers with a set charge for the cost of calling numbers starting with 084, 087 and 09. The streamlining of these charges must be printed in each customer's contract and monthly bills. The change came into force on 1 July 2015 and affected over 175 million phone numbers, making it the biggest overhaul of telephoning in over a decade. On 1 January 2016, the regulation of video on demand was transferred to Ofcom from ATVOD, the Authority for Television on Demand. The Digital Economy Act 2017 extended Ofcom's remit and powers. Ofcom were given powers concerning the minimum broadband speed provided by Internet service providers, the ability to financially penalise communications providers for failing to comply with licence commitments and the power to require public service broadcasters to include a minimum quantity of children's programming made in the United Kingdom. The act also transferred to Ofcom the regulation of the BBC, a duty previously undertaken by the BBC Trust, and updated the Ofcom Electronic Communications Code to make it easier for telecommunications companies to erect and extend mobile masts. Following a consultation over the Online Harms White Paper published by the UK government in April 2019, the government announced in February 2020 that it intended Ofcom to have a greater role in Internet regulation to protect users from "harmful and illegal content". In July 2022, Ofcom received additional tools to prevent, identify and remove any content that depicts child sexual abuse and exploitation. These tools will be introduced through an amendment to the Online Safety Bill. Ofcom will be allowed to penalise those tech firms that do not comply, either by fines up to £18m or by 10% of the company's annual turnover, whichever amount is higher. On 1 February 2025, Ofcom took the regulation of Controlled Premium Rate Services (CPRS) back in-house. These services were previously regulated by the Phone-paid Services Authority (PSA) which was disbanded on 31 January 2025 as Ofcom withdrew its formal approval of the former PSA Code of Practice. In July 2011, in the wake of the News International phone hacking scandal, Ofcom came under pressure to launch an inquiry into whether the parent company of News International, News Corporation, was still the "fit and proper" owner of a controlling stake in the satellite broadcasting company British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB). On 13 July former Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged Ofcom to launch an investigation. On 15 July the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg stated that the Government would launch a review of laws on what constituted a "fit and proper" owner for broadcasting companies in the United Kingdom, and that anyone found not to meet that standard can be forced to give up their current holdings in a company. On 22 July 2011, it was reported that Ofcom had begun an investigation into whether the phone-hacking scandal may have changed BSkyB's status as the "fit and proper" holder of a UK broadcasting licence. On the same day Ed Richards, the then chief executive of Ofcom, replied to Simon Hughes MP, Don Foster MP and Tim Farron MP following a letter which they had written to him on 8 July concerning News Corporation's shareholding in BSkyB. In the letter Richards confirmed that Ofcom considers that News Corporation's current shareholding of 39.14% in BSkyB does give it a material influence over the company; that Ofcom is not precluded from acting by ongoing police investigations; and that Ofcom's process is not dependent upon a criminal conviction being secured. In April 2012, Ofcom's probe moved from a monitoring phase to an "evidence gathering" phase. * Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications Activities Ofcom licences all UK commercial television and radio services in the UK. Broadcasters must comply by the terms of their licence, or risk having it revoked. Ofcom also publishes the Broadcasting Code, a series of rules which all broadcast content on television and radio must follow. The Broadcasting Code requires that content inappropriate for children should not be broadcast between the hours of 5:30 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. Premium-rate film services may broadcast content equivalent to a BBFC 15 certificate at any time of day provided a PIN-protected system is in place to restrict access to those authorised to view it. The broadcasting of pornography with a BBFC R18 certificate is not permitted. In 2010 Ofcom revoked the licences of four free-to-air television channels for promoting adult chat services during daytime hours and transmitting content that was too sexually explicit. The companies involved were fined £157,250. Ofcom's jurisdiction does not cover television and radio channels which are broadcast in the UK but licensed abroad. In 2012 Ofcom lodged a complaint with the Dutch media regulator regarding the content of adult chat television channels which are broadcast in the UK but licensed in the Netherlands. Based on a survey of 200 British respondents, Ofcom published in 2016 a list of about 50 words classified in four grades of offensiveness, from "milder" to "strongest". Ofcom regulates the UK telecoms sector, defining and enforcing the conditions by which all mobile and fixed-line phone and broadband companies must abide. These "general conditions" are wide-ranging rules relating to matters such as telephone numbering, emergency services, sales, marketing and interconnection standards. General condition 14.4 requires communications providers to maintain a complaints handling code approved by Ofcom, and general condition 14.7 requires an approved alternative dispute resolution (ADR) scheme to be in place. Ofcom's investigation unit monitors compliance with the conditions and resolves disputes between providers. Ofcom is also the competition authority for telecoms, enforcing remedies in markets where it believes dominant operators may have a potentially harmful influence on competition or consumers. One of its most high-profile interventions was to require BT to split its wholesale and retail arms into separate companies, bringing about the creation of Openreach which supplies wholesale services to both BT Retail and competing providers. On 1 July 2015, Ofcom made a number of changes to the way phone calls to UK service numbers would be charged. Under the new legislation, which was promoted by an information campaign entitled UK Calling, call charges must be clearly stated on all materials that advertise a service number. The changes came after research found that callers are often confused about service call charges, and thus can avoid calling these numbers. The July 2015 changes also saw 'freephone numbers' 0800 and 0808 become free to call from both mobiles and landlines. In March 2016, Ofcom launched an interactive "Mobile coverage and fixed broadband checker", allowing people to check mobile coverage and broadband speeds via their post code. Ofcom is responsible for the management, regulation, assignment and licensing of the electromagnetic spectrum in the UK, and licences portions of it for use in television and radio broadcasts, mobile phone transmissions, private communications networks, wireless devices and so on. The process of licensing varies depending on the type of use required. Some licences simply have to be applied and paid for; other commercial licences are subject to a bidding process. Most of the procedures in place have been inherited from the systems used by the previous regulators. However, Ofcom may change some of these processes in future. Ofcom protects the radio spectrum in a number of ways: In October 2010 the government announced plans for Ofcom to inherit the functions of Postcomm as part of a wider set of public service sell-off measures. Following the Postal Services Act 2011 regulatory responsibility for postal services transferred to Ofcom on 1 October 2011, with its primary duty to maintain the UK's six-day-a-week universal postal service. Ofcom makes extensive use of consultations with industry and the public to help it make decisions based upon the evidence presented. Consultation processes begin with publishing documents on its website, asking for views and responses. If the document is perceived to be long and complicated, a plain English summary is usually published as well. A period, usually of 10 weeks, is allowed for interested persons, companies or organisations to send in their responses to the consultation. After this consultation period, Ofcom publishes all the responses on its website, excluding any personal or confidential information. Ofcom then prepares a summary of the responses received, and uses this information as a basis for its decisions. Leadership Michael Grade, Baron Grade of Yarmouth was appointed as chairman of Ofcom for a four-year term from 1 May 2022. Melanie Dawes was appointed Chief Executive on 12 February 2020. As of July 2025[update], Ofcom's key personnel are: Ofcom publishes a register of disclosable interests of the Ofcom board. The first chairman of Ofcom (2002–2009) was David Currie, Baron Currie of Marylebone, Dean of Cass Business School at City University. The first chief executive (2003–2007) was Stephen Carter, Baron Carter of Barnes, formerly a senior executive of JWT UK and NTL and subsequently a Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting. Colette Bowe was appointed Ofcom chairman with effect from 11 March 2009. She was the founding chairman of the Telecoms Ombudsman Council, and chaired Ofcom's Consumer Panel from its inception in 2003 to December 2007. Dame Patricia Hodgson was appointed as chairman of Ofcom for a three-year term from April 2014. She was a member of the Ofcom board from July 2011 and became deputy chairman in January 2012. On 18 July 2016, it was announced that her term would be extended for a further year until 2018. Sharon White was Ofcom's chief executive from 2015 to 2019, having replaced Ed Richards in the role. After Sharon White was appointed the Chief Executive of John Lewis in June 2019, the office of Chief Executive remained open until Jonathan Oxley was appointed as Interim Chief Executive. In February 2020, it was announced that Melanie Dawes would become the new Chief Executive. On 15 March 2016, it was announced that Steve Gettings would become Corporation Secretary in succession to Graham Howell. Ofcom committees Ofcom has a number of committees and advisory bodies which inform the Ofcom Board and Executive. These include: Ofcom is also involved in a number of other independent organisations including being an observer member of NICC Standards Ltd. UK hate speech regulation Since 1 January 2021, Ofcom has defined hate speech as "all forms of expression which spread, incite, promote or justify hatred based on intolerance on the grounds of disability, ethnicity, social origin, sex, gender, gender reassignment, nationality, race, religion or belief, sexual orientation, colour, genetic features, language, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth or age." However, there is concern that Ofcom's broad definition of hate speech can easily result in the unjustified censorship of controversial opinions, however legitimate they might be. Controversies Ofcom has received criticism for incurring unnecessary costs as a result of "extravagant Thames-side offices" and a "top-heavy salary bill", for inflexibility in its regulation of commercial radio, and for "poor service". In response to ongoing expenditure concerns, Ofcom made the following statement regarding the 2017/2018 budget: "Ofcom has delivered 12 consecutive years of like-for-like real-terms budget reductions, and we will continue to reduce spending wherever we can." The Qatar-based news media outlet was reported to Ofcom in January 2017, following an exposé about Israeli diplomatic corps irregularities and influence peddling amongst political and student groups in the UK. After investigations exceeding eight months, Ofcom reported that Al Jazeera was in line with journalism standards and cleared the filmmakers of the allegations. In May 2011, Ofcom ruled that Press TV, an Iranian English-language satellite channel, was responsible for a serious breach of UK broadcasting rules and could face a fine for airing an interview with Maziar Bahari, the Newsweek journalist arrested covering the Iranian presidential election in 2009, that was obtained by force while he was held in a Tehran jail. Press TV said that Bahari did not "dispute the truth and accuracy" of the extract of the interview, so it made "no logical sense" to require his consent. The Sitefinder database is a national database of mobile phone base stations in the UK. In September 2007, an Information Tribunal ruled that the public should have access to the database under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. However, as Ofcom has no legal power to force mobile phone operators to add information to the database, UK mobile phone operators consequently ceased updating it. Ofcom appealed against the Freedom of Information Act ruling, together with one UK mobile operator – T-Mobile. This has led to accusations of the organisation's complicity with the mobile telecommunications industry in keeping information about mast locations secret. Ofcom's stated reasons for the appeal have ranged from "preventing terrorist attacks" on the sites of phone masts to "protecting the intellectual property" of the mobile telecommunications industry. In April 2008, the High Court found in favour of the Information Commissioner's Office and over-ruled Ofcom's objections. Ofcom appealed to the Supreme Court, who in turn referred a point of law to the European Court of Justice, and then in October 2011 ordered that the matter should be remitted to the Information Rights Tribunal to reconsider the public interest balancing exercise. On 12 December 2012, the Information Rights Tribunal upheld its decision of 4 September 2007. In 2017, Ofcom's advisory committee for Wales awarded Deryn Consulting a contract to monitor the National Assembly for Wales and Welsh Government. It was subsequently reported that the contract had not been put out to tender and that Huw Roberts and Nerys Evans held positions for both Deryn and Ofcom. The contract was terminated and Ofcom concluded that it had broken its own procurement rules. Abu Dhabi TV, owned by the Abu Dhabi Media state enterprise, was condemned by Ofcom for broadcasting a televised interview of the confessions made by a Qatari citizen, Dr. Mahmoud Al-Jaida, while he was detained arbitrarily in the Abu Dhabi prisons in 2013. The National Human Rights Committee of the State of Qatar welcomed Ofcom's decision. Under the decision, it was stated that on 28 June 2017, the Abu Dhabi TV channel, which is affiliated with Abu Dhabi Media Company P.J.S.C "ADMC", licensed under Ofcom had broadcast an interview recording titled "Mahmoud Al-Jaidah and the clandestine organization in UAE". According to the decision, the aired interview was recorded against the consent of Dr. Al-Jaidah, who was physically tortured during his time in the Abu Dhabi prison. The activity had constituted a serious breach of the principles of fairness and privacy detailed in the Ofcom Broadcasting Code. In 2019, Ofcom began an investigation into the Chinese international channel CGTN, owned by state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), following allegations that a forced confession from British former journalist Peter Humphrey was broadcast on the channel. In addition, it also received four formal complaints over similar alleged confessions. In November, Hong Kong activist and former UK consulate worker Simon Cheng filed a complaint to Ofcom a week after CGTN released a video of him admitting to "soliciting prostitution", which Cheng said he was forced to make. In early 2021, Ofcom revoked the UK broadcasting licence of CGTN. In a statement, it noted that the licence holder for the channel, Star China Media Ltd., did not have editorial responsibility over the channel, which was against legal requirements. It was also unable to hand over the licence to a corporation called "China Global Television Network Corporation" (CGTNC), on the grounds that the company was "ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, which is not permitted under UK broadcasting law". Ofcom later fined CGTN £225,000 for "breaching rules on fairness, privacy and due impartiality". Following the revocation, both the Chinese government and state media began targeting the BBC, accusing it of producing "fake news" in its coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in mainland China and the Xinjiang internment camps. CGTN itself claimed that Ofcom was "manipulated by extreme right-wing organizations and anti-China forces". In June 2022, the BBC's historian, Jean Seaton, publicly said that Michael Grade "is too lazy, too old, and has too many conflicts of interest," according to The Guardian. She called his appointment as chairman a means of "bullying" the BBC. Ofcom has been criticised by some for being seen as too lenient on GB News, which has breached Ofcom rules on a regular basis. Despite having found GB News in breach of Ofcom rules 11 times in a year, Ofcom has declined to levy any fines or penalties against the network, instead preferring to simply issue warnings. Ofcom has previously also stated that GB News can use sitting politicians as presenters on its network. Andrew Neil, the founder of GB News who has since left, has said that Ofcom needs to "grow a backbone and quick” regarding letting politicians host TV programmes. Others have accused Ofcom of political bias, pointing out that GB News has been warned for hosting MPs, whilst other broadcast networks (e.g. LBC and Talk) have also hosted MPs but received no such warning. In February 2025, GB News won a judicial review at the High Court, which found that Ofcom had been insufficiently impartial in its treatment of GB News. In 2025, an Ofcom investigation concluded that the BBC documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was "materially misleading" and that the BBC had breached broadcasting rules by failing to disclose that the narrator, a 13-year-old boy, was the son of an official of Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK. While the BBC had already removed the documentary from its BBC iPlayer, Ofcom instructed the BBC to broadcast an apology, marking the first time since 2009 that BBC had been sanctioned by Ofcom and ordered to issue an on-air apology. A BBC spokesperson confirmed that BBC fully accepted Ofcom's ruling and would comply with the sanction. On 6 January 2026 Ofcom announced that it had contacted X over the issue of generation of fake fake intimate images of women and images of child sexual abuse. They said "Tackling illegal online harm and protecting children remain urgent priorities for Ofcom," and "We are aware of serious concerns raised about a feature on Grok on X that produces undressed images of people and sexualised images of children." Ofcom said that they had made "urgent contact with X and xAI to understand what steps they have taken to comply with their legal duties to protect users in the UK". Ofcom said that depending on the reply they got, they would "determine whether there are potential compliance issues that warrant investigation". The European Union said they were "seriously looking" into complaints against Grok. Grok said on 3 January 2026 that they identified flaws in the tool which they said were "lapses in safeguards" and that they were working "urgently" go fix them. Elon Musk responded to images of public figures edited to show them in bikinis with "laughing-so-hard-I'm-crying" emojis. On 12 January 2026 Ofcom announced an investigation into X over compaints about deepfake sexual images. Ofcom said "There have been deeply concerning reports of the Grok AI chatbot account on X being used to create and share undressed images of people – which may amount to intimate image abuse or pornography – and sexualised images of children that may amount to child sexual abuse material." and "As the UK's independent online safety watchdog, we urgently made contact with X on Monday, 5 January and set a firm deadline of Friday, 9 January for it to explain what steps it has taken to comply with its duties to protect its users in the UK,". They added "The company responded by the deadline, and we carried out an expedited assessment of available evidence as a matter of urgency. We have decided to open a formal investigation to establish whether X has failed to comply with its legal obligations under the Online Safety Act.". xAI has said they will limit image generation and editing to paying customersas well as addressing users generating sexualised images of others. If Ofcom finds that xAI has broken the law, xAI can be made to comply with the law and if xAI refuses to comply, they can be fined 10% of relevant global revenues. The British government has said that they were open to ending their relationship with X if the company didn't comply. See also References External links 51°30′28″N 0°05′43″W / 51.5079°N 0.0953°W / 51.5079; -0.0953 |
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[SOURCE: https://www.theverge.com/tech/881647/meta-vr-mobile-metaverse-horizon-worlds] | [TOKENS: 1821] |
TechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechNewsCloseNewsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All NewsMetaCloseMetaPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All MetaMeta’s VR metaverse is ditching VRHorizon Worlds is now going to be a platform that’s ‘almost exclusively mobile.’Horizon Worlds is now going to be a platform that’s ‘almost exclusively mobile.’by Jay PetersCloseJay PetersSenior ReporterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Jay PetersFeb 19, 2026, 8:47 PM UTCLinkShareGiftHorizon Central, the town square of Meta’s metaverse, already runs on the new Meta Horizon game engine. Image: Horizon CentralJay PetersCloseJay PetersPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Jay Peters is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.Meta, after laying off about 10 percent of its Reality Labs division, closing three VR studios, stopping new content for VR fitness app Supernatural, and discontinuing its metaverse for work, is announcing a major change for its Horizon Worlds metaverse platform. Instead of attempting to make the 3D social platform work for both VR and mobile, Meta is “explicitly separating” its “Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform” and “shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile,” Samantha Ryan, Reality Labs’ VP of content, says in a blog post.The new approach sets Meta up to better compete with platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, which also offer user-generated experiences that can be played on your phone. Horizon Worlds originally launched for VR, but “to truly change the game and tap into a much larger market, we’re going all-in on mobile.”“We’re in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at scale, thanks to our unique ability to connect those games with billions of people on the world’s biggest social networks,” Ryan says. “You saw this strategy start to unfold in 2025, and now, it’s our main focus.”As for VR software, Ryan says Meta is focusing on supporting third-party developers. “While we’re proud of the world-class work from Oculus Studios over the years, among 1P and 3P apps, 86% of the effective time people spend in their VR headsets is with third-party apps.”But Meta is still planning to make VR hardware; “we have a robust roadmap of future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures,” according to Ryan. (That new hardware, which could include a new mainline Quest headset, might cost a higher price.)Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth made similar comments about Meta’s shift in strategy in a recent episode of the Access podcast, which is hosted by former Verge staffer Alex Heath.After the not-so-successful bet on the metaverse, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now sees AI as the new social media, a vision that could include AI-generated games that users can share with others on their feeds. “There are 3D versions of that, and there are 2D versions of that and Horizon, I think, fits very well with the kind of immersive 3D version of that,” Zuckerberg said on the company’s latest earnings call.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Jay PetersCloseJay PetersSenior ReporterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All by Jay PetersMetaCloseMetaPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All MetaNewsCloseNewsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All NewsTechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All TechVirtual RealityCloseVirtual RealityPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Virtual RealityMost PopularMost PopularXbox chief Phil Spencer is leaving MicrosoftRead Microsoft gaming CEO Asha Sharma’s first memo on the future of XboxThe RAM shortage is coming for everything you care aboutAmazon blames human employees for an AI coding agent’s mistakeWill Stancil, man of the people or just an annoying guy?The Verge DailyA free daily digest of the news that matters most.Email (required)Sign UpBy submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.Advertiser Content FromThis is the title for the native ad Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All News Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Meta Meta’s VR metaverse is ditching VR Horizon Worlds is now going to be a platform that’s ‘almost exclusively mobile.’ Horizon Worlds is now going to be a platform that’s ‘almost exclusively mobile.’ Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Jay Peters Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Jay Peters Meta, after laying off about 10 percent of its Reality Labs division, closing three VR studios, stopping new content for VR fitness app Supernatural, and discontinuing its metaverse for work, is announcing a major change for its Horizon Worlds metaverse platform. Instead of attempting to make the 3D social platform work for both VR and mobile, Meta is “explicitly separating” its “Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform” and “shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile,” Samantha Ryan, Reality Labs’ VP of content, says in a blog post. The new approach sets Meta up to better compete with platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, which also offer user-generated experiences that can be played on your phone. Horizon Worlds originally launched for VR, but “to truly change the game and tap into a much larger market, we’re going all-in on mobile.” “We’re in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at scale, thanks to our unique ability to connect those games with billions of people on the world’s biggest social networks,” Ryan says. “You saw this strategy start to unfold in 2025, and now, it’s our main focus.” As for VR software, Ryan says Meta is focusing on supporting third-party developers. “While we’re proud of the world-class work from Oculus Studios over the years, among 1P and 3P apps, 86% of the effective time people spend in their VR headsets is with third-party apps.” But Meta is still planning to make VR hardware; “we have a robust roadmap of future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures,” according to Ryan. (That new hardware, which could include a new mainline Quest headset, might cost a higher price.) Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth made similar comments about Meta’s shift in strategy in a recent episode of the Access podcast, which is hosted by former Verge staffer Alex Heath. After the not-so-successful bet on the metaverse, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now sees AI as the new social media, a vision that could include AI-generated games that users can share with others on their feeds. “There are 3D versions of that, and there are 2D versions of that and Horizon, I think, fits very well with the kind of immersive 3D version of that,” Zuckerberg said on the company’s latest earnings call. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Jay Peters Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Meta Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All News Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tech Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Virtual Reality Most Popular The Verge Daily A free daily digest of the news that matters most. This is the title for the native ad More in Tech This is the title for the native ad Top Stories © 2026 Vox Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved |
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[SOURCE: https://www.mako.co.il/music-feed/2026-m02_w03/shorts-a12f35106bc7c91026.htm] | [TOKENS: 98] |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kebaran_culture] | [TOKENS: 877] |
Contents Kebaran culture The Kebaran culture, also known as the 'Early Near East Epipalaeolithic', is an archaeological culture of the Eastern Mediterranean dating from c. 23,000 to 15,000 Before Present (BP). Its type site is Kebara Cave, south of Haifa. The Kebaran was produced by a highly mobile nomadic population, composed of hunters and gatherers in the Levant and Sinai areas who used microlithic tools. Overview The Kebaran is the first phase of the Epipalaeolithic in the Levant. Kebaran stone tool assemblages are characterized by small, geometric microliths, and are thought to have lacked the specialized grinders and pounders found in later Near Eastern cultures. Small stone tools called microliths and retouched bladelets can be found for the first time. The microliths of this culture period differ greatly from the Aurignacian artifacts. The Kebaran is preceded by the final phase of the Upper Paleolithic Levantine Aurignacian (also known as the Athlitian or Antelian) and followed by the proto-agrarian Natufian culture of the Epipalaeolithic. The appearance of the Kebaran culture, of microlithic type implies a significant rupture in the cultural continuity of Levantine Upper Paleolithic. The Kebaran culture, with its use of microliths, is associated with the use of the bow and arrow and the domestication of the dog. The Kebaran is also characterised by the earliest collecting of wild cereals, known due to the uncovering of grain grinding tools. It was the first step towards the Neolithic Revolution. The Kebaran people are believed to have practiced dispersal to upland environments in the summer, and aggregation in caves and rock shelters near lowland lakes in the winter. This diversity of environments may be the reason for the variety of tools found in their kits. Situated in the Terminal Pleistocene, the Kebaran is classified as an Epipalaeolithic society. They are generally thought to have been ancestral to the later Natufian culture that occupied much of the same range, who advanced the use of wild grains, building on the Kebaran traits to acquire some symptoms of permanent settlements, agriculture, and hints of civilization. In the prehistoric site of Ein Gev, the skeleton of a 30-40 year old woman associated with the Kebaran was discovered. The morphological characteristics assigned the individual to a Proto-Mediterranean population, being very similar to the Natufians. Evidence for symbolic behavior of Late Pleistocene foragers in the Levant has been found in engraved limestone plaquettes from the Epipaleolithic open-air site Ein Qashish South in the Jezreel Valley, Israel. The engravings were uncovered in Kebaran and Geometric Kebaran deposits (ca. 23,000 and ca. 16,500 BP), and include the image of a bird, the first figurative representation known so far from a pre-Natufian Epipaleolithic site in the region, together with geometric motifs such as chevrons, cross-hatchings and ladders. Some of the engravings closely resemble roughly contemporary European finds, and may be interpreted as "systems of notations" or "artificial memory systems" related to the timing of seasonal resources and related important events for nomadic groups. Similar looking signs and patterns are well known from the context of the local Natufia, a final Epipaleolithic period when sedentary or semi-sedentary foragers started practicing agriculture. The engravings found in Ein Qashish South involve symbolic conceptualization. They suggest that the figurative and non-figurative images comprise a coherent assemblage of symbols that might have been applied in order to store, share and transmit information related to the social activities and the subsistence of mobile bands. They also suggest a level of social complexity in pre-Natufian foragers in the Levant. The apparent similarity in graphics throughout the Late Pleistocene world and the mode of their application support the possibility that symbolic behavior has a common and much earlier origin. References Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/alxi4q57u] | [TOKENS: 215] |
רוחות ואובך בצפון, מהלילה: הגשם עשוי לחזור | התחזית לתחילת השבוע היום תורגש ירידה קלה בטמפרטורות, ובלילה ייתכן גשם מקומי קל בצפון. בימים הקרובים הוא צפוי להתחזק ולהגיע גם למרכז ולנגב, ומגמת ההתקררות תימשך |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_science_research_organizations] | [TOKENS: 50] |
Category:Computer science research organizations Subcategories This category has only the following subcategory. Pages in category "Computer science research organizations" The following 21 pages are in this category, out of 21 total. This list may not reflect recent changes. |
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