Fox & Friends Ridicule CNN, MSNBC ‘Impeachment Obsession’ While Ignoring Fox News’ Exact Same Coverage

One wonders why it seems like producers and talent at Fox & Friends rarely think things over before going through with such potentially embarrassing segment ideas.  Take, for example, this morning’s supercut of competing cable news networks and their alleged obsession with impeaching President Donald Trump.

Impeachment is a story right now, because, well, President Trump was identified by his former lawyer as a co-conspirator in a guilty plea in campaign fraud. Yes, there is an ongoing debate about the specifics of this crime — and levels of guilt associated — but if the sitting president is, in fact, an unindicted co-conspirator, then impeachment is absolutely a germane topic of conversation.

But Fox & Friends sees this coverage as the “left’s obsession” and demonstrated as much by taking a page from Mediaite and aggregating third-party content to help sell their point.

Host Steve Doocy introduced the supercut with “if you click around on all the channels, every once in a while people mention a word that starts with an I,” followed by co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy sarcastically adding “just a little bit.”

They then aired the roughly 50-second edited clip which included numerous mentions of hosts, panelists and contributors at MSNBC and CNN discussing the various form impeachment (impeach, impeachable, etc.), before resolving on a graphic that shows numbers provided by conservative media watchdog MRC: CNN and MSNBC reportedly covered impeachment 108 and 114 times yesterday, respectively.

But missing from that graphic is the number of times that Fox News itself covered impeachment, and according to TVEyes database, Fox & Friend’s home network has no room to throw stones from their glass impeachment house.

For the uninitiated, TVEyes is a transcription database that allows for easy searching by terms. Entering the terms “impeach,” “impeachable” and “impeachment” on August 23rd, we learn that EVERY cable news outlet has covered impeachment. MSNBC comes in at 123 mentions and CNN comes in at 77. But interestingly, the right-of-center (and most-watched) outlet Fox News covered impeachment by mentioning the “I” word 99 times.

Impeachment is a legitimate story but it’s also become something of a political football 10 weeks out from the midterm elections. Conventional wisdom on the right seems to believe that making the midterms a referendum on impeachment will rally the Republican base and help the GOP hold the Senate and perhaps the House.

While some more extreme Democratic politicians have openly discussed impeachment, the vast majority seem more eager to let Special Counsel Robert Mueller finish his investigation before discussing any consequences for Trump’s alleged behavior.

The media should absolutely cover impeachment as we are in uncharted political and legal territory. Fox & Friends (and Fox News writ large) wants its viewers to be afraid of impeachment and the conspiratorial media left. And as such, they appear to be just as obsessed with impeachment as CNN and MSNBC, but just for different reasons.

Segments like this do little to rebut critics who believe that Fox & Friends is a stupid show designed for stupid people. Perhaps that is why it is the most watched cable news morning show, and the favorite of this embattled president? Magic Eightball says? “It is certain.” But that is a column for another day.