Fox News is burying the bombshell CNN reporting that North Carolina’s GOP gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson posted extremist rantings, including describing himself as a “black NAZI!,” on a porn website message board. Meanwhile, host Sean Hanity has found the story’s real victim — Donald Trump.
From September 19 through September 23, Fox covered the Robinson story for only 20 minutes, with 7 of those minutes airing on Monday’s Hannity, according to a Media Matters review. This is not that strange — Fox regularly ignores or downplays stories that reflect unfavorably on Republicans as the network seeks to return Trump to the White House.
During Hannity’s coverage of the story, he complained that “the media mob” and Democrats are unfairly trying to “smear” Trump by linking him to Robinson. It should be noted that Trump endorsed Robinson and compared him favorably to Martin Luther King Jr.
Meanwhile, Greg Kelly is carving out a niche for himself as the explicitly pro-Robinson host on Newsmax, imploring the nominee not to back out of the race.
Fox News depicts the “decision desk” that calls elections for the network as an independent, data-driven body cordoned off from its right-wing propaganda machine. But the 2020 presidential election showed that this independence is a fiction: Top Fox executives are willing and able to overrule those calls if they think the results would anger Trump and Fox viewers.
With the entire right-wing apparatus — including Fox figures — framing any potential Trump loss in November as a result of fraud, that scenario could easily repeat this fall.
Media Matters’ Matt Gertz provides this insightful history on what happened with Fox’s decision desk in the 2020 election. I invite you to read through that here.
Fox is just a Trumpist propaganda outlet, not a legitimate news agency. During this election cycle, there are even fewer voices at Fox urging the network to behave responsibly.
In recent weeks, multiple Fox personalities have been in denial of objective reality that under the Biden-Harris administration, especially in recent months, violent crime has declined, inflation is steadily declining, oil and natural gas production are at record highs, and unauthorized border crossings have plummeted.
On September 23, the FBI released its annual crime statistics estimates, which showed a 3% decline in violent crime nationwide. Nevertheless, Fox, which ran nearly 1,000 weekday segments on the bogus “migrant crime” narrative in just half of this year, has denied these statistics.
Likewise, multiple measures of inflation have plummeted since their mid-2022 peak. Fox, however, continues to cover inflation in a misleading manner, falsely claiming that it is currently at “record highs.”
The same pattern continues with energy production and unauthorized border crossings. In both cases, Fox is telling its audience the exact opposite of objective reality.
The lies and misinformation Fox spews not only push false narratives to the network’s viewers — they also construct a completely separate alternative reality. It’s a place where up is down, down is up, and facts are irrelevant. In an election year, the danger of this fake reality is even more extreme.
