CNN and Fox News Both Skip Donald Trump’s Social Media Embrace of QAnon, MSNBC Jumps All Over It
Former President Donald Trump kicked off the week with some pretty wild social media activity, which included sharing multiple posts on Truth Social embracing the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory.
Trump’s “retruths,” as they are called on his Twitter knock-off, raised eyebrows across the political and media world, particularly as they coincided with multiple QAnon-linked incidents of violence in the country.
However, on cable news, on which Donald Trump still features very prominently, only MSNBC covered the former president’s embrace of the far-right pro-Trump conspiracy theory and political movement that claims Trump is fighting a secret cabal of “deep state” child sex traffickers.
A search of SnapStream’s cable news archives shows that “QAnon” was only mentioned three times on CNN in the last week – primarily in reference to GOP Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD) calling the GOP nominee to replace him a “QAnon whackjob.”
The same search found that the last time Fox News mentioned “QAnon” was host of MediaBuzz Howard Kurtz noting on Sept. 4th that Trump “posted 60 times to Truth Social, some reposts inspired by, some reposts inspired by Qanon saying the FBI’s efforts to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation means he should be immediately returned to the White House or granted a do-over.”
Kurtz’s Sunday show may yet still report on Trump’s latest social media activity and the reactions to it in the media.
MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace covered Trump’s latest QAnon posts in-depth on her show Deadline: White House Wednesday. “This is from my colleague Ben Collins who tweeted quote, ‘Trump again going mask off with the QAnon stuff on truth social today. He ‘retruthed,’ I guess that’s a thing. A Photoshop of himself wearing a Q pin plus a couple of Q catchphrases from a Q account. Trump is not flirting with QAnon anymore. He is moving in.'”
“This is a political evolution, I guess. Evolution I don’t know what we call it, that has serious domestic security implications,” Wallace continued. “Christopher Wray testified in September of the election year that domestic violent extremism of the white supremacist stripe was the gravest threat to the homeland. QAnon is sort of in a bucket of its own. It’s dangerous and freakishly bizarre. And Trump’s all in.”
“Yeah, it’s a completely bonkers conspiracy theory. And part of the reason that in addition to everything else, it’s such a total head-scratcher that you have Trump amplifying QAnon messages. Is that the conspiracy theory debunked itself over the course of Trump’s presidency,” responded Politico’s Betsy Woodruff Swan.
“It was built on this notion that Trump was going to take all these dramatic steps to incarcerate Hillary Clinton and send generals to Gitmo and on and on. Steps that Trump never took. You don’t have to be a super, super great relationship with reality to recognize that Hillary Clinton is not in prison right now,” Woodruff Swan concluded.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid also touched on the topic in a discussion with the Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes, who said:
I mean, you know, look, it’s almost as if we’ve gone post-trump here where the craziness has morphed into this mass psychosis where it’s not just a few scattered anecdotes anymore, it is state after state where you are seeing, you know, some of the most extreme election deniers, not people running on some conservative or right-wing agenda, but people who have embraced the most bizarre conspiracies.
You have Donald Trump himself, who is tweeting out pictures of himself, photoshopped pictures of himself wearing the QAnon button, you have him calling into the D.C. Jail to rally the January 6th protesters.
Watch the full clips above via MSNBC
