MIKA BRZEZINSKI (CO-HOST): What did you find exactly about -- like how would you describe the relationship? A lot of people consider Fox News at sometimes to be Trump TV, to be propaganda. Having said that, there's some great journalists there.
JANE MAYER (THE NEW YORKER): There's some great reporters for Fox News, that's absolutely true. But what there also are are a roadblock every night of hosts that do opinion shows, and every morning, that take up the major hours on the -- on Fox, that are a platform, a softball platform, for President Trump, and he works it big time. I mean, what you've got there is,according to a number of critics, the closest we've ever had to state news in this country. And what I was looking at was Bill Shine, who used to be the president of Fox News, is now the head of communications in the Trump White House. And I sort of thought, that's interesting, let's go back and take a look at this relationship. If you lift the lid layer after layer from the bottom all the way up to the owner of 21st Century Fox, the chairman, Rupert Murdoch, there's a -- kind of a symbiotic relationship here.
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MAYER: Sean Hannity and Trump speak regularly, almost every night after his show, at least that's what Sean Hannity has told people. But there is also a relationship between Rupert Murdoch and Trump, and between Rupert Murdoch and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. So you've got this sort of feedback loop going on that's very tight. I mean, we've really never had a whole national network like this that is basically -- it's incredibly close with this White House. It's -- people have described it to me as a wing of the West Wing.
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MAYER: What Fox does is it makes money by enraging Americans. That's how they keep them glued to the television set. And it's very much the same model that Trump has to keep his base engaged. So you've got a kind of rage-based model for both of them, and what it's doing is it's spinning the country in an increasingly inflamed direction. And so it has a huge effect on our national politics.
