Fox News’ role as a Republican propaganda machine is clear to anyone who has bothered to peruse its programming — President Donald Trump knows it, Fox co-founder Rupert Murdoch knows it, disgraced network co-founder Roger Ailes knew it, and longtime viewers like me certainly know it. The last holdouts arguing otherwise at this late date are some combination of ignorant, naive, on the Fox payroll, lying to the public, or lying to themselves.
To wit, Fox chief political analyst Brit Hume, touting the 30th anniversary of the network’s launch on Wednesday’s Fox & Friends, offered up a hoary chestnut in praising his employer.
“We program it in such a way that for the times of the day when people are looking for hard news, they can get it,” Hume argued. “And if they’re sitting back in the evening after they watch the news, consume whatever news they like, and we do these opinion shows at night. There’s news in them for sure, but it is a mix and I think it works well and the balance is real.”
Meanwhile, viewers who tuned in to one of those daytime “hard news” hours the day before heard the anchor open her program by effectively urging viewers to vote for Republicans: “Priority No. 1, 28 days out from midterm Election Day, Republicans must maintain their majorities in the House and Senate. I’m Harris Faulkner, you are in The Faulkner Focus.”
Fox executives have attempted to draw Hume’s distinction between “hard news” and “opinion” for decades, pointing to the hours of network programming that resemble typical news shows in order to maintain their ad sales to blue-chip companies while drawing a huge audience thanks to its right-wing personalities pumping out bigotry and propaganda. But that fig leaf has been ripped to shreds since the dawn of the age of Trump, as the network effectively merged with the president’s political operation and administration.
Indeed, the increasingly propagandistic tenor of Fox over the last decade sent a number of network veterans scrambling for the exits — and then denouncing the place they had worked, in many cases for years. Their rhetoric often echoed that of Fox critics like me — Fox was deemed “a destructive propaganda machine” (former contributor Ralph Peters) rife “with partisan misinformation” (former chief political correspondent Carl Cameron), the “arm of a political party” (former political editor Chris Stirewalt), and a network whose stars “question the truth” (former anchor Chris Wallace).
But not everyone at Fox found the network’s shifts excessively distasteful. Some used Trump’s rise to become more influential than ever before.
Hume was notably speaking alongside fellow network veteran Sean Hannity, who is not merely a Fox “opinion” host but a Trump propagandist who moonlights as a presidential confidant, adviser, and political operative. Over the years, Hannity has appeared in a Trump campaign video, drafted a campaign ad, spoken at a presidential rally, employed his lawyer, and served as a back channel to him, among other ethical improprieties no other network would tolerate. Their colleagues include Trump’s daughter-in law (who hosts a weekly program that promotes his administration); two of his former White House press secretaries; and his former campaign manager, secretary of state, and top economic adviser.
That revolving door between Trump’s orbit and his propaganda outlet swings both ways — more than two dozen former Foxers have joined Trump’s administration. The former co-host of Fox’s weekend morning show now runs the Pentagon, a former co-host of its afternoon panel show oversees federal prosecutions in Washington, D.C., and a former Fox Business host (who is married to another Fox & Friends weekend co-host) leads the Department of Transportation.
Over the past decade, any purported guardrails between the “news” and “opinion” sides have been stripped away, and the network’s number of hours that even look like “hard news” shows have dwindled. At best, such programming now occupies 8 of the 19 hours from 5 a.m. to midnight — and calling even those timeslots legitimately “hard news” is a big stretch.
Special Report, the flagship “hard news” show on which Hume often appears, is anchored by a guy who golfs with Trump and has spent his second term burying scandals about the president’s family after previously devoting his program to ripping apart the Bidens over much less egregious behavior. Amid Trump’s 2020 election subversion plot, anchor Bret Baier privately urged network brass to keep Fox from calling states for Biden, while his on-air coverage led a longtime Fox executive to comment: “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”
America’s Newsroom, which provides the first “hard news” hours of the weekday lineup, is co-anchored by a former White House press secretary to President George W. Bush who is also one of the conservative co-hosts of the afternoon “opinion” panel show The Five. Other supposed “hard news” daytime anchors regularly parrot the right-wing narratives of the network’s “opinion” hosts.
Fox’s 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. hours — previously anchored by Neil Cavuto and Shep Smith, who would both often go viral for not following the Trump line — are now hosted by Republican party appendages Will Cain and Laura Ingraham.
And Fox News Digital, the network’s online reporting arm, is helmed by Hannity’s former producer, who hired several Republican political operatives and former Trump administration officials following a purge of more traditional journalists after the 2020 presidential election.
“Brit always understood opinion, which I’ve got to give him credit for — there were some news people that didn’t love the opinion part,” Hannity quipped on Wednesday’s Fox & Friends.
Those who remain at Fox to celebrate its 30th anniversary, like Hannity and Hume, either revel in or are willing to accommodate its core aims of GOP dominance and Trumpian propaganda.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters for America
