There were still a lot of cop cars down the street when we left the neighborhood, but they were mostly gone when we returned home and apparently the situation with the neighbor who had a handgun and “mental health issues” was at least temporarily resolved, so we tried to catch up on the rest of the world’s news. The story that caught our eye was President Donald Trump urging his followers via “tweet” and impromptu news conference to stop watching the Fox News network.
The early morning “Fox & Friends” show and the evening lineup of opinion shows with “Judge” Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are much appreciated or much hated as sycophantic Trump apologists, depending on where you stand along the political divide, but Trump doesn’t seem to like what the network’s news side is reporting in between. They’ve published some polls by well-respected pollsters that show Trump in danger of losing reelection, the likes of Chris Wallace and Brett Baier and Shep Smith have been known to ask Trump administration officials some hard-to-answer questions, and worse yet, they’ve lately been covering the Democratic presidential primary campaign, even going so far as inviting the candidates to share their views and respond to some hard-to-answer questions.
Trump griped on “Twitter” that Fox is “heavily promoting the Democrats,” and that “The New @Foxnews is letting millions of GREAT people down. We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn’t working for us anymore!” All of which strikes us as a bit over-the-top, if not a full-blown mental health issue.
As longtime Fox analyst Britt Hume “tweeted,” Fox doesn’t work for the Trump administration, and except for the opinion hours is charged with reporting the truth as best as it can. Any responsible national news outlet — or “News Outlet,” if you prefer the random capitalization — is obliged to cover both party’s primary races and to ask hard-to-answer questions of all the candidates and give them respectful time to respond. Trump expects more loyalty than that, though, and it’s hard to say where he’ll find it. There’s something called the One America Network that Trump is lately touting, but for now it’s a mere blip on the media radar screen, and 24 hours a day of Trump apologetics and screeds against Fox News and other Trump enemies doesn’t seem a ratings-grabber.
Better Trump should stick by the Trump apologists who dominate most of the day’s ratings on Fox, and not ask them to choose which master they serve.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 