Philip Bump: “The Republican push to impeach President Biden formally began on Thursday with a hearing held by the House Oversight Committee on Capitol Hill. By most objective accounts, it was not a huge success for the GOP, featuring witnesses who by their own admission couldn’t provide any evidence incriminating Biden and who were loath to state that such evidence existed.”

“But in the creaky machine that is modern American politics, that doesn’t really matter. What matters is how the impeachment inquiry is perceived, and in that critical battle, the actual machinations in the hearing room are unimportant. What’s important are the snippets excerpted from the hearing and the extent to which flaws in either side’s case are smoothed over for mass consumption.”

“By that measure, the hearing was just dandy.”

“Advertisers paid a premium for airtime during the first Republican presidential debate on Fox News, but it looks like they’ll be getting a major discount during round two on Wednesday night,” Semafor reports.

“For the first debate, the cost of a single 30-second spot topped $495,000. But the same 30-second spot during Wednesday night’s contest would cost just over $200,000.”

John Ellis and I discuss Rupert Murdoch’s retirement, Fox News’s unsuccessful effort to make Donald Trump disappear and, on the eve of the second debate, where things stand in the GOP presidential nomination campaign.

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Donald Trump said on Truth Social that Comcast and NBC are enemies of the people, should be investigated for treason and suggested that he will remove them from public airwaves if elected president.

John Ellis: “Curiously, the political story of Murdoch’s retirement received little mention. But that embedded story tells a larger story, which is this: Trump won.”

“Murdoch’s attempts to persuade the populist base of the Republican Party to abandon Trump — after two-and-a-half years of concerted effort — has ended in failure. Dozens of Wall Street Journal editorials and scathing New York Post headlines have fallen on deaf ears. Fox News Channel’s ceaseless attempts to promote Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the chosen one (A New York Post headline, memorably, called him ‘DeFuture’) has fallen on deafer ears.”

“The DeSantis campaign, with Fox News’ full and fulsome support, has lost ground since his announcement of candidacy, to the point that he’s 20 percentage points down in Iowa, almost 40 percentage points behind Trump in New Hampshire and something like 35 percentage points down nationally.”

“The anger-tainment ecosystem that Fox News, above all, has created in the U.S. has left America angrier and more divided than it’s been at any time since the Civil War. In order to keep its ratings up it has sought to enrage Americans, divide Americans… and it has knowingly—and Murdoch had a personal hand in this, as we know—it has knowingly spread lies, most consequentially the one where Donald Trump claimed to have won the 2020 election. And of course that created the environment that made the January 6 insurrection possible… Trump would never have been president without the platform that Fox News created.”

— Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, quoted by ABC.

Rupert Murdoch announced Thursday that he will step down as chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp., CNN reports.

His son, Lachlan Murdoch, will become sole chairman of both companies.

Wall Street Journal: “Murdoch is one of a handful of media barons, along with the likes of John Malone, Ted Turner and Sumner Redstone, who shaped the modern era of media. He has wielded influence in political and financial capitals, earning credit from his boosters and blame from his critics. Murdoch has remained active in his later years, pursuing big deals to reshape his companies.”

Howard Stern said on his radio show that it’s a compliment being called “woke.”

Said Stern: “I hear that a lot that I’m not good anymore because I’m ‘woke.’ By the way, I kind of take that as a compliment, that I’m ‘woke.’”

He added: “I’ll tell you how I feel about it. To me the opposite of ‘woke’ is being asleep. And if ‘woke’ means I can’t get behind Trump, which is what I think it means, or that I support people who want to be transgender or I’m for the vaccine, dude call me ‘woke’ as you fucking want.”

The $1.6 billion defamation case Dominion Voting Systems brought against Newsmax following the 2020 presidential election is set to go on trial in late September 2024, a judge ruled, CNN reports.

Walt Disney Co. has held exploratory talks about selling its ABC network and TV stations to local broadcaster Nexstar Media Group Inc., Bloomberg reports.

CNN: “In conversations with more than a half-dozen people inside and around ABC News that CNN spoke to Thursday evening, it was made clear that a feeling of dread and trepidation is washing over the outlet as they face the unknown.”

Bill Maher announced he will bring back his HBO show even though his writers are still on strike:

“I will honor the spirit of the strike by not doing a monologue, desk piece, New Rules or editorial, the written pieces that I am so proud of on Real Time. And I’ll say it upfront to the audience: the show I will be doing without my writers will not be as good as our normal show, full stop. But the heart of the show is an off-the-cuff panel discussion that aims to cut through the bullshit and predictable partisanship, and that will continue.“

New “Meet the Press” host Kristin Welker will kick off her tenure with an interview of Donald Trump, taped later today at Trump’s Bedminster golf club in New Jersey, The Hill reports.

“The White House plans to send a letter to top US news executives on Wednesday, urging them to intensify their scrutiny of House Republicans after Speaker Kevin McCarthy launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, despite having found no evidence of a crime,” CNN reports.

“Donald Trump threw down the gauntlet in a Sunday evening Truth Social rant, challenging a host of his perceived enemies—including Rupert Murdoch and the ‘heads’ of his Wall Street Journal newspaper—to the same mental acuity test that he supposedly ‘aced’ a few years back,” the Daily Beast reports.

“Trump was apparently angry about a WSJ poll which asked voters about his age and mental fortitude. ‘Where did that come from?’”

“X, Elon Musk’s social media platform formerly known as Twitter, appears to be attempting to limit its users’ access to The New York Times,” Semafor reports.

“Since late July, engagement on X posts linking to the New York Times has dropped dramatically. The drop in shares and other engagement on tweets with Times links is abrupt, and is not reflected in links to similar news organizations including CNN, the Washington Post, and the BBC.”

“Fox News has fired veteran executive John Finley after determining that he violated the company’s conduct standards,” the Washington Post reports.

“Finley, who helped develop many of the network’s biggest shows and had once been Sean Hannity’s executive producer, was put on leave from his role as executive vice president of development in recent weeks while an investigation was conducted by an outside law firm. He was fired by the network Friday based on the firm’s findings.”