Fox “News”
MSM Treats Fox with a respect Fox has done nothing to earn
This is the final installment of a three-part series on Fox News’s descent from biased opinion leader to outright propaganda arm of Trump and the Republican Party - a descent many years in the making but cemented in 2023. Part 1 sorted news media into objective reporters, biased story tellers and advocates. Part 2 provided limited but I hope persuasive evidence that if Fox News entered 2023 as a biased story teller, it left as an advocate.
It’s a common trope for Fox defenders to say Fox isn’t any different from MSNBC. Or, when they really want to play the victim, they’ll add CNN and the New York Times and the Washington Post to the mix. They’re wrong, and this is the clearest argument I can muster for why they’re wrong: MSNBC is a biased news source; Fox is an advocate. It no longer in any way resembles a news source, any more than Mike Pence or your county’s Democratic chair is a news source.
When Fox chooses what stories to cover, it is not looking for stories that have the most impact on its audience. It is looking for stories that advance the cause, stories to reinforce the idea that Trump is a patriot fighting the morass of Liberal media, the Deep State and now a judicial system out to get him. This is what propagandists do.
For one compelling example, go to FoxNews.com, click on the search engine, and enter “Hunter Biden” in quotes. After the initial results, you should be able to restrict the search to whatever date range you desire.
I set mine for six months, from June 27 through December 27, 2023. Guess how many stories came up?
Wrong. It was 46,300.
Now, I admit I find that number hard to believe. I wonder if Fox is including a bunch of items that didn’t originate from Fox News. I did a spot check, clicking through to a sample of about 20 items from the search results. Every one revealed a bylined Fox News story.
Let’s assume the number is still inflated somehow. We can still put it in context. I did searches over the same time period for “Jim Jordan” (7,700 hits), “Nikki Haley” (8,510), and “Ron DeSantis” (11,800). Combined, the two most popular non-Trump GOP candidates for President and arguably the Capitol’s highest-profile Republican got a little over half the Fox coverage of the President’s son, who’s
Not in government.
Been under investigation for five years, so his suspected crimes aren’t breaking news, despite desperate GOP attempts to make them seem like breaking news.
Been formally accused of under-paying his taxes and lying so he could purchase a gun. He seems to have clearly broken the law, but these are not exactly bombshell results from five years of digging into his life. His transgressions are newsworthy, but not remotely as important as the words and deeds from Jordan, Haley, DeSantis and a few hundred other people.
Fox justifies this level of coverage because of the possibility that Hunter’s activities have corrupted the President of the United States. The sincerity of this defense is best illustrated by Fox’s breathless coverage of three payments from Hunter to Joe totaling about $4,000 to repay a car loan from Dad - during the only period over the last five decades when Joe Biden was not serving in the U.S. government.
Typical of Fox’s coverage was an article that led with Hunter making MONTHLY PAYMENTS to Joe from a business account THAT RECEIVED PAYMENTS FROM CHINA. Not until until the seventh paragraph does it mention that 1) the payments occurred in 2018 and 2) the monthly payments weren’t continuing; there were three of them, totaling a little over $4,000.
Fox News is so concerned with presidential corruption from family connections that when the story broke in 2022 about a Saudi sovereign wealth fund investing $2 billion with neophyte investment fund manager Jared Kushner about four seconds after Donald Trump’s son-in-law left the White House, Fox sprung into action. It put out 1,570 stories on Kushner over the following six months, 3% of its Hunter Biden output over a comparable period.
Of those 1,570 articles, approximately zero were as hard-hitting as Fox’s typical Hunter Biden story.
I looked at the first 50 articles in the Kushner search. Kushner slams Biden on border crisis, Kushner battles thyroid cancer, Kushner condemns the Mar-a-Lago raid, Kushner says serving another term in a Trump White House is “not my preference.” Not a single one even mentioned the Saudi fund.
There is no reasonable explanation for the fire hose of Hunter Biden coverage that preserves Fox News’ status as a biased-but-credible news source. Fox is producing paid advertising for the Republican Party, except the party doesn’t pay for it. If the Trump campaign isn’t directing Fox’s news coverage, it’s only because it doesn’t have to.
I don’t want to overstate the difference between Fox News and MSNBC.
MSNBC does have a history of insisting on a certain distance between its newsroom and the politicians it covers. It famously parted ways years ago with Keith Olbermann, anchor of its vital 8 p.m. show, over a few, small, Olbermann contributions to political candidates. (Olbermann’s defense was to cite a technicality. According to his contract he was an independent contractor and not an NBC employee and therefore not subject to NBC ethics rules. A serious journalist shouldn’t publicly support anything or anyone he might have to cover, period.)
I’m not sure that red line at MSNBC hasn’t turned a little gray and fuzzy in recent years. Some of its show formats, where its anchors move from behind their desks into a setting of host-audience closer to Jimmy Fallon than a news/opinion presentation, at least feel like advocacy. When they gather a half-dozen of their stars into a panel discussion after, say, the latest Republican debate, they sometimes sound more like Democratic operatives than news analysts - especially when they lapse into snark.
I tried to do a comparable search at MSNBC.com to see if some of its coverage is as out of whack as Fox’s. But I’m afraid the MSNBC.com search engine makes it difficult to count stories on a topic over a time period longer than just a few days.
And my sorting of the media into objective/biased/advocate isn’t a perfect indicator of reliability. I trust advocate Pod Save America, for example, more than biased story teller Olbermann’s current Countdown podcast.
But the descent of Fox News into full blown Trump/GOP propagandist is important. Fox, as the leading outlet of right wing media, has massive influence in setting America’s political agenda. It succeeded years ago, for example, in elevating illegal immigration into one of the most important topics in Presidential politics, even though:
The elevation took place immediately after a 15-year decline in illegal immigration, and
Research on the topic generally fails to make any significant connection between illegal immigration and crime, economic decline, or any other social problem. It’s always a concern when any laws are broken on a widespread basis. But since Trump came down the escalator to launch his 2015 campaign, drunk driving (37 deaths a day, 50 times or so that number in injuries) has had more devastating impact on more people than illegal immigration. Is drunk driving on anyone’s top-25 list of important presidential issues?
Somehow, the mainstream media continue to grant Fox News a certain level of respect, such as allowing Fox stars to moderate political debates. An organization that pretends Hunter Biden is a scandal and Jared Kushner is not doesn’t deserve that respect.
This has to stop. When Fox News breaks a story, the MSM should treat it exactly like a leak from Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee. A piece of information from McDaniel might be impactful news worth reporting, but a responsible journalist will do a lot of skeptical reporting before accepting that. Same should be true of Fox News.
And the next time a Trump supporter cites Fox News while arguing with you, ask him how much credibility he’d give to a report from Biden’s campaign manager.