During the early days of the Obama administration, I did a few appearances on Fox & Friends. The conversations were predictably shallow, tilted and exploitive. The hosts had a particular knack for asking the idiotic with chipper earnestness, spewing venom through simpering smiles. There was, I felt, maleficence at work with a pretense of positivity.
Appearing on Fox, I became part of the disinformation machine rather than hobbling it. So, I cut ties, stopped responding to their requests, and stopped the appearances.
This show, with its kindergarten-level intellectual capacity, moved from parroting conservative policies to constructing presidential priorities. Fox & Friends has essentially become Donald Trump's daily briefing.
Countless media outlets have written and talked about the strangely intense connection between Trump and the show. As The Guardian put it, "The show manages to serve as a court sycophant, whispering in the ear of the king, criticizing his perceived enemies and fluffing his feathers."
And the impact that the show is having on Trump is undeniable. Dan Snow, a master's student at the University of Chicago, analyzed the president's tweets and found that they are highly concentrated in the hours when the show is on.
As Politico wrote, Trump is "live-tweeting" Fox's coverage. Vox noted that at times he seems to be tweeting precisely what he sees on the show, sometimes even using its exact language.
According to PunditFact, a project of Tampa Bay Times and Poynter Institute that checks the accuracy of claims made by pundits, of the statements on Fox that have been fact-checked, only 10 percent were rated true, while a full 60 percent were rated either mostly false, false or "pants on fire," the worst possible rating.
Brian Kilmeade once said on the show that "the Swedes have pure genes because they marry other Swedes" and of Finland he said, "Fins marry other Fins so they have a pure society," which was apparently better than America because "We keep marrying other species and other ethnics."
The intellectual giant who is Steve Doocy once attacked SpongeBob for pushing a "global warming agenda." This would all be silly trifle if in January the show didn't mark its 195th month as the No. 1 morning cable news program and if the president of the United States wasn't taking cues from it.
In a way, the United States is being governed by the dimmest of wits on the most unscrupulous of networks. The very thought of it is horror-inducing.
Editorial on 04/11/2018