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Fox News Is Losing Its Grip
The network is desperately downplaying the biggest political drama of our timeand viewers are tuning out.
By Will Oremus
Fox News is starting to slump.
Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos by Rob Kim/Getty Images Entertainment, Thinkstock.
May 9, 2017, was a momentous day in American politicsunless you were watching Fox News.
Late that afternoon, President Trump stunned Washington by firing James Comey less than a week after the FBI director had testified to Congress about, among other things, the bureaus investigation into the Trump campaigns possible connections to Russia. On the heels of that news came a rapid-fire series of revelations that cast the dismissal in lights ranging from sinister to farcical.
Trump claimed in his letter axing Comey that the latter had informed him on three separate occasions that Trump was not under investigation, which if true would have violated FBI protocol. Trumps White House sought to justify the firing, implausibly, as a response to Comeys handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigationfor which Trump had previously praised him. Comey learned of his dismissal when he saw it on TV, and he thought at first it was a prank. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer hid in the bushesno, among bushesto dodge questions from reporters. The night unfolded as if scripted by a screenwriter with a gift for dark humor.
And indeed, to anyone watching the news on CNN or MSNBC, here was a real-life, high-stakes drama wrapped in layers of deception and absurdity, unfolding minute by minute, one jaw-dropping development after the next.
On Fox News, however, it was an altogether different story. Viewers of the nations most-watched cable network were told first that Comey had resigned, then that he had been fired and that the move was controversial. But on show after show, from late afternoon into the night, the reasons for Comeys dismissal and the nature of the controversy were glossed over, and the juicy details that followed went unmentioned. The networks hosts almost unanimously treated Comeys firing as a fully justified and unsurprising development and accepted wholesale the White Houses official explanation that Comey had been fired for cause. (Trump and his administration later changed its story multiple times.)
Notice the difference?
more...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/05/fox_news_refusal_to_cover_trump_s_scandals_makes_for_bad_ratings_and_boring.html
BigmanPigman
(51,564 posts)JenniferJuniper
(4,507 posts)babylonsister
(171,030 posts)At least I hope so. He's too out there, way too much tin-foil.