Were he alive today, Joseph Goebbels, head of Hitler’s propaganda machine, would have admired Fox News and Fox Business. Never before in our history have a media network and a presidential administration worked closer together to disseminate falsehoods and to coordinate messages.
Yes, Fox does have some professional journalists such as Bret Baier, Chris Wallace and Neil Cavuto, to name a few, but the vast majority of their television personalities are little more than presidential sycophants. Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, Jesse Watters, Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade are all there to support Trump enthusiastically. And the holy trinity prime time players of Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham parrot whatever Trump tweeted earlier in the day.
Just as the Catholic Church told its parishioners back in the 1950s what books not to read, Trump has done an effective job of inoculating his supporters from reading or listening to any news other than Fox. All other outlets are simply “fake news.”
Just like Trump, Fox continues to question the legitimacy of the election and, therefore, the legitimacy of our next president. Just like Trump, Fox downplays the impact of COVID-19, and just like Trump, Fox fixates on Hunter Biden.
The network hosts one guest after another who declare with 100 percent certainty that Biden did not win the election, despite the facts to the contrary. Jesse Watters listened attentively as our country’s trade negotiator, Peter Navarro, spouted falsehoods about the so-called rigged election. Jesse nodded affirmatively, but never dared ask, “If there is so much evidence of fraud, why hasn’t a single court in the land, including Republican judges, agreed with you?”
Laura Ingraham had a guest on the other day, and the two of them ridiculed the notion that the country was running short of ICU beds, when of course we are.
And when the Russians hacked into our nuclear labs and when over 3,500 hundred Americans died from COVID-19 in a single day, Fox was fixated on Hunter Biden’s income tax investigation. Fox calls itself “fair and balanced,” but it is anything but.
Burt Ross