Conservative media outlets, including the Washington Examiner, the Weekly Standard, RedState, National Review, the Daily Wire, Hot Air, the Resurgent, the American Spectator and TheBlaze have given significant coverage to the Democratic electoral victories Tuesday night in Virginia and New Jersey.
But you wouldn’t know that from reading Politico, which published an article this week titled, “Conservative media: What Virginia results?”
The piece declared, “For Fox and other conservative outlets, the Democratic romps on Tuesday didn’t merit much attention.”
It’s true: Fox News’ Sean Hannity largely ignored the election results Tuesday evening. The right-wing host gave a paltry six seconds to mentioning the Democratic victories before segueing back into whatever pro-Trump agitprop he already had planned for that evening.
But to be fair to the network, he was followed by hosts Laura Ingraham, who spent roughly ten minutes discussing the elections, and then Shannon Bream, who spent even more time digging into the gritty of the Democratic victories.
There’s no getting away from the legitimate criticism that the largest and most successful cable news company in the country botched its election night coverage. It’s difficult to defend the network’s decision not to cut to their breaking news desk to cover the results. It’s even more difficult to defend this decision considering Fox’s morning crew twisted themselves into pretzels Wednesday morning downplaying the shellacking Republicans took.
However, it’s absurd to take the Fox News data point and force a narrative alleging that the whole of conservative media ignored the election results. It’s even more absurd to try to bolster this claim by citing Breitbart News, InfoWars, and the Gateway Pundit as additional examples of “conservative media” lacking interest in covering the elections.
There’s a big difference between “conservative media” and pro-Trump propagandists. The Weekly Standard, RedState, and the Examiner‘s are examples of the former. InfoWars and Gateway Pundit are clearly examples of the latter.
Secondly, Breitbart News, which is the closest that the Politico article comes to finding an actual news operation other than Fox to support its opening statement, did cover the election results.
The problem here, according to Politico, is that these pro-Trump media groups didn’t cover the Democratic victories enough.
And that’s really the only point that the Politico article tries to make – that right-leaning newsrooms should’ve dedicated as much time to covering the elections as, say, CNN and MSNBC.
The story’s author even claims deep down in his report that, “On conservative websites, the election results did receive some coverage, but by midmorning Wednesday, most had moved on.”
So, just to be clear, the Politico article is arguing that: Conservative media did cover Tuesday’s election results. But Fox barely said anything, and some right-wing Trump propagandists ignored it altogether, therefore the “Democratic romps on Tuesday didn’t merit much attention” from conservative media.
Seems like a fair assessment.
(h/t Caleb Howe)
