A recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests Fox News may well determine whether or not Donald Trump remains in office.
PRRI’s summary provides this striking statistic:
“A majority (55%) of Republicans for whom Fox News is their primary news source say there is nothing Trump could do to lose their approval, compared to only 29% of Republicans who do not cite Fox News as their primary news source.”
Greg Sargent has more:
And here’s another real doozy: In response to my inquiry, PRRI tells me that 71 percent of Fox-citing Republicans strongly approve of Trump, while only 39 percent of non-Fox-citing Republicans strongly approve of him.
“The numbers show that Republicans who watch Fox News tend to be much more pro-Trump,” Natalie Jackson, the research director for PRRI, told me. “Fox seems to be a powerful vehicle for Trump support.”
Of Republicans overall, 44 percent say Fox is their primary source — meaning we’re talking about a very large chunk of the GOP base. “What Fox is putting out there is really impacting Republicans’ opinions,” Jackson said.
We don’t know which is the chicken or egg in this scenario but, as Sargent noted, the two “seem to reinforce one another – and that may prove a significant factor in keeping GOP lawmakers in line” behind Trump.
Recently, reporter Gabriel Sherman called Fox the “firewall” around Trump’s removal from office and suggested that the network may be more powerful than Republican senators in that regard. “He can maybe lose some Republican senators but the key constituency that he has to hold is the Fox News audience,” Sherman explained.
Fox News was created for this moment. As Media Matters explains, founder Roger Ailes was a Nixon acolyte who blamed the press for hounding him out of office, not the corruption and criminality exposed by the Watergate scandal. The PRRI poll shows that Ailes’ legacy may be able to do for Trump what the living Ailes could not do for Nixon.
Sargent concludes that the situation “both underscores the case for a popular mobilization and suggests how overwhelming it would need to be to move the required 20 GOP senators” for Trump to be removed from office.
But that grassroots effort had better be media savvy. Because nobody excels at weaponizing the news like Fox. Except, maybe, Russia.
Watch Washington Post’s mashup of the Fox News war against impeachment below.
(H/T Christini Yogini)
“……Proof willful ignorance trumps (no pun intended) all.”
Which is VERY SAD YET VERY TRUE EOF. It only proves what I’ve said NUMEROUS TIMES here before: frustrated, low educated people with VERY TWISTED AND WARPED MINDS will always seek out scapegoats to blame for their problems, their failures and their position in life. You need to look no further than early 1930s Germany (shortly before Adolf HItler and his Nazis seized power) as proof. Always keep this ancient proverb in mind:
THOSE THAT DO NOT LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT!