Here's my review of the Fox News Primary over the first 8 months of the year. Tom Cotton is working hardest to put himself in front of the Fox audience, but Ron DeSantis is better at making the network part of his wins and he rules in primetime: mediamatters.org/fox-news/cotto…
DeSantis quite literally owes his governorship to a Fox News-focused strategy, so it will be worth watching this going forward. He is very adept at using the network for best results.
By contrast, Cotton's aides are clearly putting him on Fox every chance he gets, he vastly outpaces the field (113 vs Pompeo's 55, and the latter is on the Fox payroll), but he's not a fav of Hannity or Carlson and basically just gives his take on news of the day.
Also worth mentioning that Sean Hannity's show is an ongoing cattle call for the GOP field, he's done 90 of the groups' 498 interviews over the first eight months of the year.
Why does this matter?
Fox hosts have spent the year undermining the COVID-19 vacciner campaign; drifting toward a paranoid, fascistic, apocalyptic politics; and institutionalizing former President Donald Trump’s lie that the election was stolen.
To try to appeal to those powerful forces in the GOP, would-be presidential hopefuls will need to adopt extreme rhetoric and policies. And during a pandemic, that comes at enormous costs.
Fox News is flooding its airwaves with incendiary coverage blaming President Joe Biden for a handful of abhorrent crimes allegedly committed by migrants. mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-n…
The network’s coverage relentlessly dehumanizes migrants with constant suggestions that the entire group is composed of dangerous criminals and lacks anything resembling subtext.
Trump’s election strategy revolves around such fearmongering about migrants. But the Trump/MAGA preferred narrative is both repugnant and inaccurate. Studies show immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit violent crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.
Major news outlets provided dramatically more coverage of Hunter Biden’s federal gun trial than former President Donald Trump’s repeated declarations this month that, if reelected as president, he may direct prosecutions of his political enemies.
The Big Three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) collectively produced 18 times more coverage of the trial than of Trump’s calls for politicized prosecutions, while the A-sections of five major newspapers featured six times more articles about the trial, according to a Media Matters review. mediamatters.org/broadcast-netw…
But the stakes of the Hunter Biden trial are nonexistent for anyone outside the Biden family.
At stake in Trump's threats of “revenge” is whether or not the U.S. justice system will continue to turn on anything other than a president's personal grievances.
Hunter Biden's guilty verdict on federal gun charges comes amid a years-long right-wing media effort to delegitimize the federal justice system as a weaponized arm of the Democratic Party. mediamatters.org/joe-biden/maga…
But MAGA propagandists, rather than abandoning their conspiracy theories, are coalescing around a new twist: The conviction is an “op” in which Hunter Biden is being deliberately sacrificed to protect the rigged system.
The new right-wing line that Joe Biden rigged the trial to put his son in prison replaces the old right-wing line that Joe Biden was rigging the trial to keep his son out of prison.
Trump says he'd use the National Guard and even (illegally) the military to arrest and deport millions of migrants. His "plan" is notably light on details, which seems like a guarantee for child-separation-style cruelty. time.com/6972022/donald…
🚨 Trump says the tax he wants to implement on virtually everything you buy could be in excess of the 10% figure he's floated before.
FLASHBACK: A Trump-appointed prosecutor dropped an unfalsifiable partisan bomb on President Joe Biden Thursday, playing into a years-long right-wing media campaign — and U.S. political journalists decided to treat it as a valid and impartial charge.
Sean Hannity's Fox News show ran with this informant's claims in at least 85 separate segments last year, including 28 monologues. He said they proved Joe Biden engaged in "public corruption on a scale this country has never seen before.” mediamatters.org/fox-news/study…
Of course the benefit of building wild conspiracy theories premised on the bogus idea that the DOJ under Biden is in the tank for Democrats is you can move directly to claiming this prosecution is part of the conspiracy. mediamatters.org/fox-news/trump…
Per the indictment, the informant's story is impossible; he claimed in the 1023 that a Burisma official told him he bribed the Bidens around December 2015, but the informant never met with a Burisma official until 2017. justice.gov/sco-weiss/medi…