It was clear from its Monday edition that Fox & Friends was more than ready to move on from covering family separation at the U.S. southern border and the growing debate over immigration. Fox’s morning show devoted nearly four times as much time to Republicans being heckled and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) encouraging people to confront members of the Trump administration as the program gave to the topics of immigration and family separation.
This morning, Fox & Friends kicked off with a lengthy segment in which co-host Steve Doocy said, “Let’s talk a little bit about what’s going on in the world of politics, and it looks like the whole world has gone crazy in some respects. There’s all this political intimidation going on. You got Stephen Miller down in Washington, couldn’t eat out, Kirstjen Nielsen couldn’t eat out, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, we’re going to talk about that in a minute.” The program then aired the comments Waters made over the weekend, in which she said, “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
The Fox show’s first hour also included segments about people who want to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, MS-13 gang members, Hollywood elites attacking Trump, North Korea, and Jimmy Fallon. It wasn’t until the second hour of the show that the hosts even mentioned the debate over immigration and the family separations that are occuring at the border.
In total, Fox & Friends spent nearly 24 minutes covering the report that Sanders was kicked out of a restaurant, Maxine Waters’ comments, and other instances of Republicans being heckled. Doocy even called Sanders’ expulsion from a Lexington, VA, restaurant “one of our big stories.” Not one of their big stories? The families that have been torn apart at the border. Fox & Friends devoted just over six minutes to immigration and family separation. And most of that coverage focused on tweets from President Donald Trump and attempts by Republicans in Congress to pass immigration legislation rather than on what is being done, if anything, to reunite families that the administration has separated.
Fox’s focus on presenting Republicans as the victims of so-called liberal intolerance was made exceedingly clear by the network’s decision to actually send a correspondent to the Red Hen restaurant during its next show, America’s Newsroom. In comparison, there wasn’t a single correspondent report from any detention center during Fox & Friends or America’s Newsroom today.