For those of us who closely follow legitimate news sources, it is perhaps difficult to imagine Donald Trump winning reelection. From Mueller, to impeachment to coronavirus and all the other scandals and missteps in between, the concept of another four years of Trump seems impossible to the rational mind.
But then we see polls like the one on Thursday from CNN which shows Trump actually winning the so-called “battleground states.” Many of you have written to us with a one-word question: How?
It’s as easy as Fox News. While hundreds of legitimate journalists search for the truth, Rupert Murdoch’s full-time propaganda machine has gone into overdrive, pushing a highly produced narrative that has one goal: keeping Donald Trump in the White House. And millions of Americans are glued to it.
Here is the latest example. We bring it to you in the spirit of knowing what Democrats are up against. Trump was “interviewed” by Maria Bartiromo of Fox. Her last “question” encapsulates the Fox creed: “Why are you so popular?”
But it’s so much more than fluff interviews. As the death toll from coronavirus passed 80,000 and unemployment soared to more than 30 million, suddenly the virus took a backseat to another story that Fox thought more important, the “unmasking” of former national security advisor Michael Flynn. Brian Stelter, host of CNN’s Reliable Sources writes:
“After Republican senators released a list of Obama officials who sought to unmask the name of an unidentified American caught in intelligence reports, who turned out to be Michael Flynn, Fox News went all in on the story. (When asked about the lack of coronavirus coverage, a Fox News spokesperson pointed to coverage from earlier in the afternoon.)
“Fox News hosts such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham hyped the new developments as part of the supposed “OBAMAGATE” scandal the network has been promoting for the last few days with President Trump.“
And the closer we get to November, the more sensational these stories will become. Nothing will be out of bounds if it wins votes for the incumbent. Stelter adds:
“And while it might be tempting to ignore all of this, and brush it aside, there is a real news story here: It’s that the President of the United States, in conjunction with a major American network, is polluting the information wells during a pandemic to help distract from the bad news and boost his re-election efforts.“
THIS POST CONTAINS OPINION AND ANALYSIS.
