On The Rachel Maddow Show, Joy Reid put the pieces together and illustrated how the Trump/Fox News connection goes beyond friendly coverage and into the kind of state-run media that keep the dangerous Trump presidency hanging on.
Video:
Reid said, “The relationship between Fox News and this white house goes well beyond friendly coverage. The prime-time personality has been dubbed the shadow chief of staff. It is the only network the president routinely grants interviews to and the network that Ailes built has become a kind of pipeline for White House hires.”
To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
She continued, “This administration and Fox News is something of a revolving door with people cycling in and out of both. While we’ve seen the news personalities go from the green room to the podium, today president is blurring the line even more. Essentially merging the two operations with the official announcement he has hired Bill Shine to run communications at the White House as his deputy chief of staff for communications. The former Fox executive resigned from the network last year amid accusations that he enabled a culture of sexual harassment at the network. A number of women at the network, some in court documents, that he was aware of deeply inappropriate behavior against them and sought to suppress their concerns rather than take actions to address them constructively. Now shine, a personal friend of Sean Hannity, will be getting a new job in the white house backed by his years of experience at Fox News. He will become Trump’s fourth white house communications director. A post first created by one Richard Millhouse Nixon.”
The dangers of the Trump/Fox News connection go beyond friendly coverage
Even more so than the propaganda that Fox News spreads daily, the bigger problem is that the fact-free ideology and the people behind it are holding positions in the Executive Branch of the United States government. The people who are making policy for more than 300 million Americans are the same people who preach to a few million extremists daily on Fox News. Fox has always been out of step with mainstream America.
For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.
The danger is that Fox News has hijacked the federal government.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
