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.
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…
TheBlaze’s Jason Whitlock hosts notorious antisemite to denounce supposed Jewish control of US government, Black people mediamatters.org/blazetv/thebla…
JONES: "The Jews... have spent their entire time here in the United States of America undermining the moral fabric of the American people."
E. MICHAEL JONES to Whitlock: "It’s called Biden’s minyan — you can look this up too — there are 457 Jews who are running the Biden administration. They’re the people who are in charge, OK? So there’s no point in talking about Joe Biden." mediamatters.org/blazetv/thebla…