Trump’s Mouthpiece
Fox News Graduates to Pure Propaganda in 2023
This is part 2 of my series on the biggest news media story of 2023. In part 1, I described a way to divide news media among 1) Objective Reporters, 2) Biased Story Tellers, and 3) Advocates.
The biggest news media story of 2023 was the final, probably irreversible descent of Fox News from Biased Story Teller to Advocate.
If there was any debate about where Fox News stood heading into 2023, two news stories settled the matter. It’s now clear that Fox is first and last a propaganda arm for Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
The first story was the release of multiple texts and emails among Fox executives and on-air stars concerning coverage of Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims, from the months immediately following that election. They headlined the discovery phase in a defamation lawsuit that persuaded Fox attorneys to hand over a staggering $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems.
The conversations preserved in texts and emails were devastating. Fox News stars and executives fretted over losing the confidence of viewers. They worried about rogue reporters straying from Trump’s argument that voter fraud handed the 2020 election to Biden. They panicked over the rising audience of upstart Right Wing outlets like Newsmax that were embracing the voter fraud angle more enthusiastically.
Did the available evidence support or refute Trump’s claims? The conversations didn’t just fail to answer that question. They ignored it. In a vocabulary perversion worthy of “1984,” they frequently focused on protecting their credibility with their audience. But “credibility” had nothing to do with telling the truth; it was entirely about keeping their audience happy and loyal by supporting Trump’s claims. It is crystal clear that no one anywhere near the top of the Fox leadership pyramid gave a fig about whether their reporting was accurate.
That story received blanket coverage in the mainstream media, especially when it led to the ouster of Fox’s prime time star, Tucker Carlson.
The second story received less coverage, and the coverage largely missed an important point. The second story was the aftermath of Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as House Speaker and who would replace him. When Rep. Jim Jordan managed to force Steve Scalise to the sidelines as the heir apparent, despite Scalise receiving the most votes in the Republican caucus, Jordan had a powerful advocate - remaining Fox prime time star Sean Hannity.
When Jordan fell a few votes short of winning the Speaker role but still looked like a viable candidate, Hannity, through one of his show’s staff, sent messages to GOP holdouts that included, “Sources tell Hannity that Rep xxxx is not supporting Rep Jim Jordan for Speaker. Can you please let me know if this is accurate? And, if true, Hannity would like to know why during a war breaking out between Israel and Hamas, with the war in Ukraine, with wide open borders, with a budget that’s unfinished, why would Rep xxxx be against Jim Jordan for Speaker?”
If this had been just a one-off, where Hannity crossed the line from opinion journalist to active participant in the political process, I’d say it’s not fair to draw drastic conclusions. But Hannity has been crossing that line for years, serving as Trump’s political consultant on a regular basis and speaking at political rallies. It was but a small step from these practices to twisting the arms of GOP House Reps on behalf of Jordan, like a House Whip. Hannity’s supposed bosses, Fox News executives, endorsed these practices by sitting on their hands, as they have at every transgression by a Fox anchor - up to and including Carlson’s outright racism - unless the transgression cost them money.
Most of the coverage of Hannity’s campaign for Jordan focused on the political impact of Hannity’s outreach - would it help or hurt Jordan’s ambitions? The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake was one of the few who focused on what this said about Fox’s status as a presenter of news - and even Blake pulled his punches.
“This is not normal for a journalist, even an opinion host,” Blake wrote. “It’s one thing to apply pressure on behalf of your preferred candidates on air, but employing the Jordan side’s talking points and doing personal, private outreach is something else entirely.”
Blake doesn’t define the “something else entirely.” I will. It means that when Fox reports something from now on, it carries all the credibility of a Trump fund-raising email.
In part III, we’ll discuss why this matters.