Letting Trump spout his smears and attacks live and unchallenged on Fox is going to be the new normal, Media Matters president Angelo Carusone said.
Last night, I wrote about how Fox’s Trump town hall demonstrates the resiliency and staying power of the Fox/Trump marriage. On MSNBC, Carusone discussed the sinister implications.
CARUSONE: It’s reckless and irresponsible [to put Trump on live TV], and it's going to be the new normal [at Fox], because what we saw last night is that - you know, at least when Trump was in 16, and then during his presidency, there was a back and forth, you know, sometimes you couldn't tell who was leading who. Right now. Fox News is totally an organ of Trump. So, there is no more confusion about which direction that it's being pulled, who's actually steering the ship there. It is totally now a full appendage of Trump.
And what's scary about that is because Trump is increasingly organizing power on the extremes and on what would be considered the fringes, Fox News will now become an accelerant for normalizing all kinds of extreme ideas that even they haven't been willing to touch for a while. So that dynamic … is only going to intensify and get worse. And so, we saw the real first play in it last night, which was that they didn't just give him a town hall, they counterprogrammed and let him do it during prime time. Something that was - even [Fox host] Brett Baier conceded was simply because that's what Trump wanted.
[…]
[W]hat we saw last night wasn't just a surrender and humiliation for Fox, it was actually Trump picking up the baton and showing us who's going to end up sort of hijacking the rest of the right-wing media. Now, it will be an echo chamber led by Fox and Trump.
I believe Carusone is 100% on the money about this. Fox will probably stop Trump if he says something that could cost them another big defamation payout (the Smarmatic and Ray Epps defamation lawsuits are still pending, e.g.) but as far as Biden, the Democrats or any judicial figure goes, the propaganda, the Hitler rhetoric, the bigotry and the stochastic terrorism will almost certainly be scripted by Trump and get darker and more dangerous.
You can watch the full Carusone interview below, from the January 11, 2024 All In with Chris Hayes, via Media Matters.
I would just add that at least part of Fox’s motivation for going even farther to the Extreme Right is that they’re being pulled there by their competitors on the Right Wing fringe. Angry Right Wing propaganda outlets like “Newsmax” and “Breitbart” and “The Blaze” and “OAN” etc, are continuing the dark work they’ve been inflicting for the past decade and more. It is frankly shocking that some of those outlets are now pushing so far off the cliff of the Extreme Far Right that they are accusing Fox itself of somehow being “left” or “liberal”. (It’s interesting to also note that many of these propaganda outlets have scooped up the former Fox hosts from the past – like Greta Van Susteren and the disgraced serial harasser Eric Bolling.)
In the wake of the 2020 Election, most of these outlets followed Little Trump’s lead of frantically trying to deny the outcome. It was frankly obvious that they were desperately placating Little Trump’s inability to admit to being a loser.
And in the current context, the desperation of Fox to not be completely outflanked on the Right by these extremists, many of them being fronted by former Fox faces, is understandable. It doesn’t make Fox any less craven for doing it, but one can see why Fox is panicking like this.