Media Matters' John Whitehouse on The New Republic's The Daily Blast: Fox News is not telling their audience about “what the consequences are of this MAGA rule”
Whitehouse: “They've retreated so much into a propaganda network that basic facts about what's happening are no longer being shared”
Published
Media Matters' John Whitehouse on The New Republic's The Daily Blast: Fox News is not telling their audience about “what the consequences are of this MAGA rule”
Citation
From the April 12, 2024 edition of The New Republic's The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent
JOHN WHITEHOUSE (SENIOR NEWS DIRECTOR, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): So, with coverage of the Alabama ruling and IVF on Fox News, it was staggering how little the network covered it. Over a period of roughly a week between February 16th and February 23rd, Fox News gave it six minutes of coverage. Comparatively, there was over three hours on both CNN and MSNBC, just to give a little bit of context there. And whereas Fox News is only covered for six minutes, they are trying to protect their audience from the actual policy implications of the Republican Party. And simply by telling the truth about what's happening, this is a Republican court making Republican decisions, imperiling IVF, while they are pretending that there are no such risk of this happening ever, anywhere.
And so the objection from Media Matters’ perspective is not that people have different opinions on IVF or or anything like that, although we do have different opinions on IVF. The core issue with Fox News is that they're not telling their audience what the consequences are of this MAGA rule that is happening across the country. That is the core issue of Fox News right now, is that they've retreated so much into a propaganda network that basic facts about what's happening are no longer being shared. Grappling with the challenges of your movement and what you don't want to hear about is important. It is important to have that dialogue to talk things through to understand when things are going too far, and we've seen this with democracy, we saw this with January 6th. And now we're seeing with these cultural issues, and, you know, basic reproductive rights issues of abortion, IVF, and reproductive health across the board, and it's only been getting worse.
GREG SARGENT (HOST, THE DAILY BLAST): There appears to be an interesting divide here as well. I think you guys have noted that some of the more journalistic minded people on Fox, like Bret Bair, do sometimes or at least to some degree talk about how abortion does pose a serious problem to Trump's presidential campaign. But the major Fox personalities, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and increasingly Jesse Watters, I guess, really downplay or ignore this stuff. Does being a Fox celebrity kind of require you to do this? I mean, to put this another way, does highlighting bad news for Trump's chances cut against the goal of having a massive celebrity audience at Fox?
WHITEHOUSE: I would say yes. And it seems unequivocal at this point that their audience, the MAGA audience that Fox News is targeting, that it needs to target, that they have built their entire financial model on, requires them to make concessions, requires them to play along with memes that are being built up and being elsewhere. And we saw this really with the 2020 election, and we really got to get, you know, a really keyhole view into that kind of malevolence with the Dominion trial. We saw how Fox News operated and how Fox News just bent over backwards to make the lies more palatable. And now we're seeing that happen on an industrial scale with IVF, with abortion, with – you alluded earlier to Mike Pence coming out against Trump.
It is anything that is inconvenient for the audience, they do not want to deal with. They do not have you know, it maybe, like, 20 or 15 or 20 years ago, they would be able to push back and have an argument. Now it's just ignore it, and let's just talk about things that, in their view, are bad for Biden.