Fox News

• WASHINGTON, March 1, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Following is a statement from National Press Club President Emily Wilkins, and National Press Club Journalism Institute President Gil Klein on the contempt order and fine imposed on Catherine Herridge- related to her journalism at Fox News.
• Founded in 1908, the National Press Club is the world's leading professional organization for journalists.
• With 3,000 members representing nearly every major news organization, the Club is a leading voice for Press Freedom worldwide.
• The National Press Club Journalism Institute promotes a more engaged global citizenry through a free and independent press.

• Hannity asked Trump to guarantee he would not abuse his power or seek retribution if he was reelected in 2024.
• But evidence suggests that Trump may, in fact, abuse power and seek retribution if he regains the presidency.
• For example, Trump hinted that he will use the Department of Justice to persecute his political adversaries.
• So Trump’s jokey response may tell the truth, or at least a distorted version of the truth.
• But what’s different is the type of humour that Trump and the politicians that follow him indulge in.
• Telling an offensive joke serves up prejudice and hatred with a side order of irony.
• Delivered with a nod and a wink, humour reassures us that it’s all just “a bit of fun”.

Joking aside

• In his 1905 book The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, Freud argued that jokes – especially offensive ones – reveal our inner urges.
• We are trained from an early age to be kind and polite to other people.
• But offensive jokes let us temporarily pause social prohibitions and flirt with our innermost fantasies.
• After all, Trump was only joking about being a dictator.

Nick Butler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• We had just published a piece by two security analysts from the Paris-based research university Sciences Po, who had outlined three possible scenarios for the 12 months ahead.
• The first two options were major military setbacks for Russia or Ukraine, with major losses of troops and territory.
• Months of bitter, attritional fighting resulted in few Ukrainian gains at a significant cost in terms of both manpower and precious materiel.

• But, as Stefan Wolff and Tetyana Malyarenko point out, Syrskyi is also associated with the defence of Bakhmut, a battle that consumed so many lives on either side.
• But fresh supplies of weapons and ammunition from the EU and the US began to dry up in 2023, seriously hamstringing the Ukraine army’s ability to gain the initiative on the battlefield.

• You can also subscribe to our fortnightly recap of expert analysis of the conflict in Ukraine.
• After months of bitter debate the bill finally passed the senate this week.
• Read more:
  Ukraine war: what the US public thinks about giving military and other aid

Friends and enemies

• One of Trump’s greatest allies in the media, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, sat down with Putin for a two-hour interview last week.
• Inderjeet Parmar, an expert in US politics at City, University of London, watched the interview and gives us his verdict.
• He concludes: “Putin’s early history of Ukraine is part of a Russian imperialist story that has been told for centuries.
• He says more than 7,000 criminal cases have been opened accusing Ukrainians of giving aid to the enemy.
• Others are less so: people who continued to do their jobs after their town was occupied: local government officials, garbage collectors and the like.

• The world got another taste of Putin’s view of history on February 6, when the Russian leader was interviewed by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
• Putin began this two-hour interview with a lengthy monologue about the medieval history of Russia and Ukraine.
• As far as Putin’s narrative about Rurik goes, modern scholars interpret the people behind Novgorod’s “invitation” as a literary invention.
• Those principalities were ruled over by different branches of the Rurik dynasty, who often fought with one another.

• The language of Kyivan Rus was Old East Slavic (OES), the language from which modern-day Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian derive.
• For example, in OES “the Rus land” is “ruskaya zemlya”, while in Russian the strikingly similar “russkaya zemlya” means “the Russian land”.

Blame it on Poland

Putin then skipped forward a few centuries, suggesting to Carlson that the idea of Ukraine was really invented by the Poles. From the late 16th century, part of what had been Kyivan Rus was incorporated into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Although this area would later become Ukraine, Putin implies that it was actually Russian, and that the Poles invented the idea that it was Ukrainian as a way of undermining Russia.

• This culture was unique in its innovation of conservative religious tradition and development of new cultural forms.
• His book also presented western-inspired images that stood in stark contrast to Russia’s Byzantine-style icons, introducing new and provocative ways of envisioning Christ.
• Putin painted a picture of this area as fundamentally Russian and its people as passive, shaped by their imperial overlord Poland.
• Ever since Russia began forming around Moscow from the 14th century, it saw itself as a continuation of Kyivan Rus.

Nick Mayhew does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.