![]() ![]() There’s a growing body of reporting establishing the close relationship between the Trump administration, Trump personally, Rupert Murdoch, different shows on Fox, and specific on-air personalities, most closely Sean Hannity. People hate Trump so much that they’re watching to see their anger reflected back at them.” Sean Illingĭo you know of any evidence, apart from the synchronicity of messaging, that Trump is dictating talking points to anyone at Fox News? Tom Rosenstiel “MSNBC and CNN are building their networks on outrage. And this is exactly what we’re seeing today. It is another thing to coordinate your battle plans with the current White House. This sort of thing may have been going on at a more indirect level for years in the political journalism world, but it is one thing for the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section to have a consistent ideology and to write from the point of view of that ideology. Hannity then echoes much of that messaging on his program. Hannity and the president reportedly talk almost every day. The same thing is true, but even more so, of Trump and Sean Hannity. So it’s not just a mere ideological affinity. This is an active collaboration, and it’s conscious and direct. The synchronicity between Fox & Friends and Trump, for example: the fact that he’s watching, and they know it, and know that he is in turn tweeting out things they say while the show is still on and that those tweets are being picked up. When you say “parts of Fox News” are now propaganda, what do you mean? Which parts? Tom Rosenstiel That is absolutely an accurate description of the situation right now. I think that because of the way Trump has begun to interact with certain programs and because of the way Fox has allowed some of its personnel to interact with the administration, there are parts of Fox News that are now a propaganda arm of the government. Is Fox News a propaganda operation or merely a partisan news organization? Tom Rosenstiel We discussed the evolution of Fox News, whether there’s any precedent for this in American history, and if he thinks other, more liberal cable news outlets like CNN and MSNBC are helping to normalize the model set by Fox.Ī lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. Rosenstiel studies the history of media in America and has written a book on the ethics of journalism in the digital age. To get some answers, I reached out to Tom Rosenstiel, a media scholar and executive director at the American Press Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting sustainable journalism. So how concerned should the average American be? It certainly seems like Fox News has essentially become state TV. Administrations and politicians have always sought to use the media to their advantage, of course, but this feels different. Shine’s presence at the White House, along with Trump’s ties to on-air personalities like Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Jeanine Pirro, all but cemented the unofficial relationship between Trump and the right-wing news network. To top it off, Trump’s previous director of communications and deputy chief of staff, Bill Shine, is the former co-president of Fox News. World leaders as well as members of Congress quickly learned that one of the best ways to communicate a message to Trump is to say it on Fox News. Trump constantly watches Fox News, tweets out claims he hears on the network, reportedly speaks regularly with Sean Hannity, and gives the majority of his interviews to Fox News. There’s plenty of evidence to support the argument. Back in 2017, the New Republic’s Alex Shephard floated a similar argument, writing that “Donald Trump is treating Fox News like state TV.”Įven Bret Baier, a lead anchor at Fox News, addressed the claims in a 2018 interview with the New Yorker, saying it “pains” him to hear that the cable news channel has become “state TV” for the Trump administration. But people are increasingly questioning whether it has crossed a line in the Trump era and become an outright propaganda operation.Ī recent piece by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer is the latest to pose this question. Fox News has always been a partisan news network.
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