The Transformation of Fox News
The Transformation of Fox News
Gradually turning into a mirror image of CNN?
By Lloyd Billingsley
“We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics,” boasted Joe Biden back in October. The inclusive, extensive voter fraud was much in evidence on November 3, particularly in crucial swing states. The following Monday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany accused Democrats of welcoming fraud and illegal voting.
“You don’t take these positions because you want an honest election,” McEnany said. That got a rise out of Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto.
“Unless she has more details to back that up,” Cavuto told viewers, “I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this,” and he duly cut away. Fox anchors used to say, “we report, you decide,” but that was all over now, replaced by a different dynamic.
On election night Fox made bad calls while voters were still going to the polls, and any second thoughts were hard to find. Fox’s zeal to make the call for the addled Joe Biden surpassed any instinct to investigate the voter fraud Biden openly celebrated. This is a network supposedly “fair, balanced and unafraid,” and if viewers doubt that slogan it would be hard to blame them. Take, for example, the presidential debate.
Fox’s Chris Wallace recycled a discredited Trump tax story and failed to ask Joe Biden why, like other prominent Democrats, he had requested to unmask Gen. Flynn in January of 2017. Unlike the tax story, that is an undisputed matter of fact. In effect, Wallace was Biden’s debate partner, and he was also on board with the Russia hoax. When Nancy Pelosi called the vote for impeachment, Wallace proclaimed, “I have to say I can feel goosebumps.”
With the possible exceptions of Jeff Zucker or Brian Stelter, Chris Wallace could be the least telegenic man on cable. Chris is the son of Mike Wallace, a big star of CBS News, and without daddy, one doubts that son Chris would have landed jobs at NBC, ABC, and Fox, which was thrilled to have him.
Like Chris, everybody at Fox News now wants to be like Mike, and the Fox news division shows little distinction from CBS and the rest of the Democrat-media axis. Fox News could easily have set itself apart by covering stories the other networks missed or refused to cover, like the one that broke in May of 2017.
In Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, presidential biographer David Garrow wrote that Dreams from My Father was not an autobiography or memoir. It was “without any question” a novel, and the author a “composite character.” That is, as they say, a Big Story, but Fox did not dispatch reporters to get a response from the composite character president formerly known as Barry Soetoro.
Likewise, Fox’s allegedly “unafraid” reporters failed to seek out any of the luminaries who hailed Dreams from My Father as an authentic autobiography and memoir. Any Fox reporter could have cross-checked the Barack Obama archive at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. As the archive confirms, in all his writing from 1958 to 1964, Barack Obama mentioned nothing about a white American wife and Hawaiian-born son. No such investigation took place on any network, and another Big Story broke in 2018.
Becoming by Michelle Obama and The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, by Ben Rhodes, both avoided any mention of David Garrow’s Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. Like Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, what these 2018 books revealed was interesting but what they concealed was crucial. That devious dynamic goes all the way back to the early 1930s.
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, also known as Josef Stalin, deployed a famine that killed several million Ukrainians, obstacles to Stalin’s collectivization plans. According to New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, on the other hand, there was no famine in Ukraine, allegedly holding up well under Stalin’s scientific socialism. For this fake news atrocity Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize, which the Times has never disowned. So no surprise the Times gets a Pulitzer for the mendacious 1619 Project.
As in the 1930s the prizes go to those who take pride in their fakery. For further reference, see The Treason of the Intellectuals, by Julian Benda, foreword by Roger Kimball. That’s why all this happened, from the two-term composite character president to the Russia hoax to massive voter fraud in 2020.
Fox News, meanwhile, deserved a prize for the “Scandalous” documentary series, particularly the episode on Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity et al are still worthy of attention but the news desk now serves up a different story. As in Animal Farm, when viewers look from Fox to CNN it’s sometimes hard to tell which is which.