On Morning Joe, Angelo Carusone points out that Fox News is Trump's policy shop, political shop, communications shop, and HR department
Published
Citation From the September 19 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe
JONATHAN LEMIRE (ASSOCIATED PRESS WHITE HOUSE REPORTER): Let me switch back to Fox for a second.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah.
LEMIRE: The president of course has made the media an unprecedented part of his story of his campaign. There's no president that likes their press coverage, but there hasn't been someone who's called us the enemy of the state before, either.
CARUSONE: Right.
LEMIRE: But the relationship between Fox News and the president is also unprecedented.
CARUSONE: Yeah.
LEMIRE: I was there when Sean Hannity was at the final rally before the midterms election last year, and he introduced the president on stage in Missouri.
CARUSONE: That's right.
LEMIRE: So what are some of sort of troubling signs you're seeing between the president and Fox -- and not just like the occasional late night phone call with Tucker Carlson about foreign policy.
CARUSONE: Yeah. I think if I were to describe the relationship and why it's troubling, I think it's -- one of them is the attacks, right. So it's easy to focus on that. The thing that really troubles me about it though is that Fox News right now, it's sort of merged, and they're functioning in many ways like a policy shop, like a political shop, a communications shop, and an HR department. I mean, 18 Trump officials -- 10 of them current, right -- were prominent Fox News personalities that then got hired, right. Then there's another 5 or so administration officials that left and now work for Fox News.
JOE SCARBOROUGH (CO-HOST): And even with all of that, the president of the United States spends a lot of Twitter time attacking Fox News, attacking Shep Smith, attacking Judge Napolitano, attacking people who -- Chris Wallace, who actually attacked the president.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI (CO-HOST): All those people.
CARUSONE: I think -- it's totally right. There's definitely a few Fox News personalities that he zeroes out, and then Fox News as a whole -- this idea that they're not going to actually sort of carry water for him -- and it's actually affected their news coverage. One of the complaints was that the news anchors were letting Democrats go on air and not defending him directly. And immediately after a wave of those Twitter attacks that you referenced, some of the anchors during the daytime started to actually repeat or push back immediately after some of these Democratic officials were making complaints.
BRZEZINSKI: Wow.
CARUSONE: So it can change and influence behavior. You work the refs, you get in their heads.