Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
■ Ralph Peters, a military analyst for
Fox News, said he is quitting the network because he believes it has turned into a propaganda machine for President Donald Trump’s administration. Peters, a retired U.S. Army officer, said he told Fox at the beginning of March that he did not want his contributor contract renewed. “Over my decade at Fox, I was long proud of the association,” Peters wrote in an email that was distributed to colleagues at Fox News, and first reported by BuzzFeed News. “Now I am ashamed.” In a statement Tuesday that the network did not want attributed to a specific spokesman, Fox said Peters was entitled to his opinion, “despite the fact that he’s choosing to use it as a weapon in order to get attention.” Fox said it was proud of its opinion programming and primetime hosts. Peters also accused the network of “scaremongering” with lurid warnings of deep-state machinations, saying he believed Fox had “degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.” Peters said it appalled him that “hosts who made their reputations as super- patriots” now advance the agenda of Russian President Vladimir Putin by making light of Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He also criticized prime-time hosts for “profoundly dishonest assaults” on the FBI, the Justice Department, the courts, the intelligence community and special counsel Robert Mueller, who is conducting an investigation into the Trump administration’s dealings with Russia.
■ Renee Zellweger has transformed her looks and is working on her singing skills as she starts a new film about Judy Garland. Principal photography for Judy is underway in London, and the producers have released a photo of the Academy Award winner playing the troubled star. The movie is set in the late 1960s near the end of Garland’s career and will feature the behind-the-scenes drama before Garland died in the city at age 47 in 1969. Zellweger is expected to sing in the film, including “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from Garland’s 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. Zellweger sang in the 2002 film Chicago. Other cast members include Jessie Buckley, Finn Wittrock and Michael Gambon.