LeafByNiggle
Well-known member
PBS News Hour report Fox News and a new book by Brian Stelter:
As the presidential election approaches, questions are raised daily about not only the candidates themselves, but also how they are covered by the news media. In President Trump’s case, the attention focuses on his relationship with Fox News. Judy Woodruff reports and talks to CNN’s Brian Stelter, author of “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.”
Stelter: You can’t understand why the president is out there misleading the country about voter fraud and about anarchy in cities that isn’t really happening without understanding where he is getting it from. He is getting from “Fox & Friends” in the morning, on “Sean Hannity” in the evening.
It is that feedback loop, the likes of which America has never seen before. And because he is oftentimes getting low-quality information, not the kind of high-quality information you get from the nightly news, he ends up misleading everybody as a result.
Judy Woodruff: Give us some examples…
Well, that is what I mean about, when they try to help him, they end up hurting him.
On the very first day, the first weekend, the inauguration crowd size debacle, the president was getting bad advice from Fox.
And, more importantly, with the impeachment saga, the president was hearing negative news about Ukraine on Fox. The seeds of the Ukraine scheme were planted on Hannity’s show, and it led to Trump’s impeachment.
So, a lot of this is about what sources of information the president is receiving. And that was most dangerous this year, Judy, with the pandemic. As Fox’s stars downplayed the pandemic, Trump did as well. And that has had life-and-death consequences.
Hundreds of staffers in and around Fox confided in me, saying: We have gone off the rails. This is always a channel that leans to the right, and that is a good thing. There should be conservative-leaning news and liberal-leaning news, and lots of kinds of news. But they say: No, no, it has gotten too extreme now. The rhetoric is too extreme. The racism and xenophobia in prime time is too extreme.
Some journalists at Fox have left the network. Other stay because they want to try to make it better. And there are anchors like Chris Wallace, who is going to be moderating a debate, who’s the exception to the rule.
When the president tells you to distrust the media every single day, when he uses the word hoax so often that nobody knows what to believe anymore, we’re going to have a challenge in this country that’s going to long outlast the Trump presidency.
As the presidential election approaches, questions are raised daily about not only the candidates themselves, but also how they are covered by the news media. In President Trump’s case, the attention focuses on his relationship with Fox News. Judy Woodruff reports and talks to CNN’s Brian Stelter, author of “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.”
Stelter: You can’t understand why the president is out there misleading the country about voter fraud and about anarchy in cities that isn’t really happening without understanding where he is getting it from. He is getting from “Fox & Friends” in the morning, on “Sean Hannity” in the evening.
It is that feedback loop, the likes of which America has never seen before. And because he is oftentimes getting low-quality information, not the kind of high-quality information you get from the nightly news, he ends up misleading everybody as a result.
Judy Woodruff: Give us some examples…
Well, that is what I mean about, when they try to help him, they end up hurting him.
On the very first day, the first weekend, the inauguration crowd size debacle, the president was getting bad advice from Fox.
And, more importantly, with the impeachment saga, the president was hearing negative news about Ukraine on Fox. The seeds of the Ukraine scheme were planted on Hannity’s show, and it led to Trump’s impeachment.
So, a lot of this is about what sources of information the president is receiving. And that was most dangerous this year, Judy, with the pandemic. As Fox’s stars downplayed the pandemic, Trump did as well. And that has had life-and-death consequences.
Hundreds of staffers in and around Fox confided in me, saying: We have gone off the rails. This is always a channel that leans to the right, and that is a good thing. There should be conservative-leaning news and liberal-leaning news, and lots of kinds of news. But they say: No, no, it has gotten too extreme now. The rhetoric is too extreme. The racism and xenophobia in prime time is too extreme.
Some journalists at Fox have left the network. Other stay because they want to try to make it better. And there are anchors like Chris Wallace, who is going to be moderating a debate, who’s the exception to the rule.
When the president tells you to distrust the media every single day, when he uses the word hoax so often that nobody knows what to believe anymore, we’re going to have a challenge in this country that’s going to long outlast the Trump presidency.
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