Fox News is under a barrage of criticism from other news outlets and journalists who don’t like that President Trump is so close to the network and its star anchors.
In recent days, critics have accused Fox News of operating as a reinforcement mechanism for some of Trump’s more controversial policy positions.
Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” host Brian Stelter pointed to Trump’s recent comments against illegal immigration, alleging that they were inspired by Fox programming and saying that the two together “is a symbol of everything that’s wrong” with how the administration functions.
“A lack of quality information, first of all, reaching the president,” he said. “He’s relied, instead, on his Fox friends, sometimes via TV, sometimes on the phone, sometimes in person. Now his addiction to Fox and other pro-Trump commentators leads to impulsive actions. In this case he’s definitely playing to his base, stoking anti-immigrant fears.”
The story that Trump spoke about in tweets and other public remarks was about a caravan of illegal immigrants traveling largely from Central America into the U.S., which was first reported by BuzzFeed, not Fox, which Stelter acknowledged.
Trump has often heaped praise on the morning program “Fox & Friends,” and he often cites the show in his tweets weighing in on political issues, giving the impression that he is likely responding to what he is seeing on TV.
[Related: President Trump retweets Eric Trump’s congratulations to Fox News for dominating cable news]
Liberal New York Times columnist Charles Blow on Sunday criticized the show as “shallow, tilted and exploitive” and complained that it “has essentially become Donald Trump’s daily briefing.”
Last week, after it was reported that Fox personality Lou Dobbs has occasionally joined in on official White House conference phone calls with the president, Esquire magazine’s Charles Pierce described it as part of an “Attack of the Moron Pundits.”
Attacks on Fox News aren’t new. The network was routinely singled out by former President Barack Obama when he was in office for what he said was its hostile and slanted coverage of his administration. Critics also said the channel functioned as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration during those years.
But because of Trump’s aggressive broadsides against much of the rest of the national media, and outspoken approval for sympathetic hosts on Fox, it appears to have raised the temperature in anti-Fox resentment among its competitors.
Speaking at a conference on the news business in late March, top CNN executive Jeff Zucker reportedly described his network’s rival as “state-run TV” and a “propaganda machine” and said it’s “doing an incredible disservice to the country.”
In one incident of high media drama, Ralph Peters, a retired United States Army lieutenant colonel and longtime Fox News contributor, denounced the network in an email memo to colleagues last month, wherein he said that Fox had become “a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.”
He took special exception with Fox News’ “prime-time hosts,” which includes Sean Hannity, an outspoken Trump supporter.
The charge that Fox is operating like a propaganda mill was also used by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
He wrote in February that, “We also now have our own major state-run network, Fox News, that treats our president as ‘Dear Leader’ — much the same way that China’s People’s Daily does Xi.”
