There seems to be two kinds of Fox News watchers: conservatives who love the network and liberals who hate it. While many Dems wouldn’t want to touch the channel with a 10-foot pole, CNN media reporter Brian Stelter makes the case in this bonus episode of The New Abnormal that watching its propaganda, as someone who sees through bullshit, can actually make you smarter, well, “a smarter news consumer.”
Or, at the least, host Molly Jong-Fast says, watching can be beneficial “to see what the Republican messaging is up to.”
As author of the book Hoax, which was recently released in paperback, Stelter knows way too much about Fox News and told Molly that calling Arizona first during the election, and pissing off a lot of their audience enough to watch Newsmax instead, changed Fox’s trajectory for the worst.
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“They went deeper into the voter swamp. They went deeper into the voter fraud depths to try to win the viewers back,” he says. “[During] the Trump years, the network was moving away from the facts and minimizing news. That was true, but it’s gotten a lot worse.”
And in that swamp there’s a monster: Tucker Carlson, whom Stelter calls Bill O’Reilly’s “horrifically dark” heir apparent.
Also, why does that network absolutely target Vice President Kamala Harris over President Joe Biden?
Plus! The Twitter feed that Stelter is watching very closely, and news about Fox’s Decision Desk Director that may or may not be known to the public yet.
Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
