Fox News Shrugged Off Tuesday’s Historic Elections As If They Were No Big Deal
Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.
Election night 2017 saw an exceptional number of wins for the Democratic Party, especially in gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia. Fox News hummed along in its news coverage Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, and managed to essentially skip over reporting this news.
As Chris Hooks tweeted, Fox News’ coverage Tuesday night covered topics including Trump’s speech in South Korea and Mark Fuhrman of the OJ Simpson trial speaking on gun control. When the results of the Virginia election were discussed, it was incredibly brief:
52 minutes into ingraham’s show, we turn to VA. not trump’s fault. gillespie was an establishment boy. at one point ingraham ejects “hillary’s emails” completely unprompted. do tax reform.
— chris hooks (@cd_hooks) November 8, 2017
With a nine percentage point margin, Democrat Ralph Northam beat Republican Ed Gillespie to be Virginia’s governor. Many saw the race in Virginia as both a temperature check of the impact of Trump, and are gleaning lessons about voter turn-out for the 2018 midterms.
Sean Hannity commented briefly on the results, noting “those results in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York, by the way—not states that Donald Trump won.” Laura Ingraham’s contribution included referencing Hillary Clinton’s emails and saying “Gillespie never jumped on board the Trump train. He’s an old Bush hand. I think he gave it his best shot. He is who he is—not a populist conservative.”
The end of Chris Christie’s eight years in office in New Jersey will see Democrat Phil Murphy taking the spot instead of Republican Kim Guadagno. In addition to the gubernatorial races, history was made when two openly transgender candidates won seats — Danica Roem in the Virginia House of Delegates and Andrea Jenkins (who is also the first openly transgender candidate of color elected) in the Minneapolis City Council. Other results of election night 2017 include the election of Kathy Tran, making her the first Asian-American woman to serve in the Virginia House of Delegates, and attorney Larry Krasner being elected the district attorney of Philadelphia.
Even when comparing Fox News’ homepage to other news sites, the coverage emphasis was drastically different.
CNN: Here are the results from last night’s election
Fox News: What election? pic.twitter.com/5yqJTd4GrU— Angelo Carusone (@GoAngelo) November 8, 2017
On Wednesday morning, Fox & Friends had its ear turned to other topics, focusing on the anniversary of Trump’s election, with a panel that resulted in arguments about the recent NFL protests.
During the week of October 30, Fox News was the most watched cable news network. But if viewers had been watching Tuesday night, or even Wednesday morning they would have missed the historic election results.
Emily C. Bell is a news writer at AlterNet.
