With the president now pulling double duty as leader of the free world, and head of social media Fox & Friends, the gang at Morning Joe waded into the incredibly perilous territory of media criticism — specifically their network rivals at Fox.
Joe — as only he can — set the tone with an opening monologue in which he casually declared that Fox News had abandoned its mantle to steering Conservative opinion and now functioned as a “wholly owned subsidiary of Trump inc.”
And it really went from there.
“Fox News, when they came onto the scene in 1996, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch had a winning formula and that was Conservatives against the world,” said Scarborough offering a bit of history. “Conservatives weren’t getting their voices heard on mainstream networks so they could go to Fox News and it was uniting. Here was a network that united the entire conservative movement and for the most part the Republican party.”
Then, however, came Trump.
Donald Trump changed that formula. And we saw some real splits down the middle there. What I find fascinating about what Donald Trump’s retweeting on Fox & Friends and the makeup of Fox now is that this has ceased to be a network that follows Conservatism or follows the Republican party, it seems now to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump inc. I’m not even saying that negatively. I’m fascinated by the media and always have been, but they’ve gone all in on Donald Trump to such a degree that they’re being critical of Jeff Flake, they’re being critical of other Republicans for not being loyal to Donald Trump.
Indeed, after a high water mark during the first Republican debate, Fox News’ prime time opinion line up has largely gotten behind Trump and shown a growing willingness to blame the GOP Congress for the Obamacare repeal failure (and all the other failures). On the other hand, some network luminaries like Chris Wallace and Charles Krauthammer have shown a willingness to buck Trump.
… Needless to say, however, their commentary doesn’t get much airtime on the president’s Twitter feed.
[image via screengrab]
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