Fox Trump Channel

Let me begin with an assertion that I think is undeniable: Were it not for Fox News Channel, particularly its simpering morning show, Donald Trump would never have been president.

In the process, the channel turned from being a promising upstart news organization to an untrustworthy mouthpiece for a rickety administration it doesn’t bother to examine.

When the channel went on cable in 1996, there was skepticism: it was an expensive thing to do, especially against the three broadcast networks and Ted Turner’s Cable News Network. Where just a few years earlier people would rush to ABC when there was breaking news, now they went to CNN. Fox’s real-life coverage had been limited to programs such as “A Current Affair,” and other tabloid trash. What was the idea? Was Fox News going to do real news?

At first, it did. Some great reporters and anchors were hired, people like Brit Hume from ABC and Neil Cavuto from CNBC and the great Tony Snow. It was run by Roger Ailes, a media-savvy professional Republican. While it did lean to the conservative, it reported straight news well. The motto, “We Report, You Decide,” was justified, even in opinion programs. For example, the “Hannity and Colmes” program was hosted by the handsome if not very bright conservative Sean Hannity and the smart-though-unattractive liberal Alan Colmes. There was balance.

There were intelligent, incisive correspondents, such as political reporter Carl Cameron. There were also correspondents of a lesser variety: I’ll never forget the night in December 2000 when Rita Cosby appeared with the just-printed — and apparently unread — ruling in her hand and breathlessly announced that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that Al Gore would be the next president.

During the Bill Clinton — Monica Lewinsky scandal of the late 1990s, a new program appeared at 6 p.m. weeknights. “Special Report” was anchored by Brit Hume and was and largely remains the best news program on television.

The channel quickly put the lie to its other slogan, “Fair and Balanced.” It more and more became neither. Most of its programs were not news but news-inspired shouting matches. Then the shouting died down: opposing views pretty much disappeared. As did the “Fair and Balanced” motto.

The “me, too” movement hit the network hard, costing it, among others, Roger Ailes, who has since died. The morning show princess, as the woman on Fox broadcasts is often called, Gretchen Carlson, had filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against him and. A settlement was reached. Ailes resigned.

The morning show, “Fox and Friends,” featured Steve Doocy, who did the weather and was part of the cast-on-the-couch, Brian Kilmeade, who seemed to be the sports guy, and a woman. The two guys are still there; the women have come and gone. Doocy’s son Peter is the channel’s main White House correspondent.

Early in the last decade, Trump would do weekly call-ins to the show, and he was encouraged to yammer on, frequently being encouraged to run for president. The fawning was enough to induce vomiting. His early base was built among viewers of the morning show on Fox News Channel, as well as “reality” television fans. Ailes loved it — he said it was good for ratings. He did discontinue the practice when Trump actually announced his candidacy, to avoid the appearance of obvious favoritism. But it was too late for that.

There has always been a problem with bias in news coverage. When I was at CBS there were people in that windowless newsroom who were actually surprised when Walter Mondale lost to Ronald Reagan in 1984. (Reagan got 525 electoral votes to Mondale’s 13. It was never in doubt.) You’ll survey a lot of newsrooms — well, not a lot; there are few newsrooms remaining — before you’ll find a “Republican” and even more before you find someone claiming to be a Republican who is not a Trumpian instead. The left has owned the nation’s newsrooms since the Roosevelt administration.

Republicans have long talked about Walter Duranty, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times in the 1920s and 30s who flat-out bought Stalinism while never casting a critical eye to the atrocities committed by Stalin. Sadly, after its promising start as a real news organization, Fox News Channel’s relationship with Trumpism has become about the same as Duranty’s was with the Soviet regime.

The relationship between Fox News Channel and the Trump syndicate has become unashamedly incestuous. A score of former Fox News employees have been appointed to posts in the Trump administration.

They include:

Pete Hegseth, a loud and loutish weekend morning host is our secretary of defense.

Sean Duffy, a former four-term congressman, was a Fox Business Channel host before becoming secretary of Transportation. His wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, is a weekend morning show host. (They met while filming a MTV “The Real World” reunion show on which they both appeared.)

Tulsi Gabbard, former congresswoman, Fox contributor, and apparent fan of (recently deposed) Bashar al-Assad and Putin’s Russia, is now Trump’s director of national intelligence.

Sergio Gor, a former Fox News booker — the person who arranges for people to be on the channel’s programs as guests, you know, like being on the morning show every week — now heads the White House personnel office.

Tammy Bruce, a paid Fox contributor and occasional employee, is the spokeswoman for the State Department.

Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, presidential candidate, Fox News host, and pitch man for patent medicine, has been nominated to be ambassador to Israel.

Morgan Ortagus, a former paid commentator at Fox News, has become “Deputy Special Presidential Envoy for Middle East Peace,” which is to say she’s been paid to sit down and shut up, a familiar Trumpian approach to women.

Kimberly Guilfoyle used to be Gavin Newson’s wife but left him for greener pastures (which would seem to become a habit). She was a brassy loudmouth on Fox’s “The Five” but then left to campaign for Trump in 2018. She later was engaged to Donald Trump Jr., who left her for someone a little less industrial. Trump Sr. has nominated her to be the U.S. ambassador to Greece, getting her safely out of the way. (She was replaced on the afternoon show by Jeanine Pirro, another woman of brassy (but tarnished) squawks, who was Westchester County, New York district attorney when her husband Al was sent to prison for tax evasion. They divorced. She was linked with Bernard Kerik, the former NYC police commissioner. She asked him to bug her husband’s boat, which conversation was itself picked up on a law enforcement wiretap. Soon thereafter Kerik, too, went to prison for tax fraud. Al Pirro was pardoned by Trump on the latter’s last day of his first term. Kerik had been pardoned by Trump a year earlier.)

The list goes on and on. A couple, Dr. Marty Makary, former Fox News contributor has been named Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, and Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a former Fox contributor chosen to be Surgeon General, may bring actual qualifications to their respective jobs.

Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business and Laura Ingragam of Fox News, both aging Trump cheerleaders, were recently named to the board of Kennedy Center. Both are still at Fox. Perhaps Trump is lining up votes to rename it Trump Center. Make a note.

The incest goes both ways. There are, and have been since Trump was defeated in 2020, a gaggle of peroxide victims who used to work or something in the Trump White House, on Fox News.

Retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, a longtime Fox News contributor, is doing Trump’s bidding now in Ukraine negotiations. Meanwhile, retired Gen. Jack Keane, another longtime contributor and formerly a frequent guest on Fox News, has all but disappeared from the channel. This is oddly coincident with the think tank he chairs, the Institute for the Study of War, having become critical of Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine. He is someone Trump doesn’t want seen, and now he isn’t.

The once-respected Lawrence Kudlow now thumps the tub for Trump an hour each day on Fox Business in lieu of a market close program. He was an appointee in the first Trump administration.

Most egregiously, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, wife of Trump’s son Eric, now has her own show on Saturday night on Fox News Channel. As I write this Wednesday afternoon, she is appearing on “Outnumbered,” the noon show the purpose of which appears to be to prove that Trumpian women are every bit as stupid as the menagerie on “The View.”

This kind of thing has always occurred to some extent. Bill Moyers was Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary before going to PBS and CBS — the initial letter changed, but the BS remained the same. Edward R. Murrow angrily left CBS to become director of the U.S. Information Agency in the Kennedy administration. Clinton flack George Stephanopoulos went to ABC afterwards.

There are other examples, on Fox News, but there’s a difference. Former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer has been a frequent guest commentator on the more serious Fox News Channel news programs, and Dana Perino, a George W. Bush press secretary (who took over the job when Tony Snow grew ill), has been a panelist on “The Five” and a highly competent political commentator at the channel. She was also an Obama nominee to the Broadcasting Board of Governors. But they are there, unlike the current crop, to do more than be blond. Never has there been the kind of intermingling that we’ve seen on Fox News during the current administration.

Nor have we ever seen the lack of administration scrutiny that Fox News Channel currently displays. It is as if it has come down from on high in the corporation that Trump will be covered as if he can do no wrong. The channel has gone from a reliable news source into a Trumpian P.R. arm. Even formerly trustworthy anchors, correspondents, and commentators have been slavish, even slobbering, in their praise for Trump. The straight shooter Neil Cavuto was suddenly ushered off the network between the election and the inauguration. He was not the sort to promote a tabloid presidency. He was replaced by reliable Trump sycophant Will Cain.

We now have no reliable source of news. It might be time to revise an old metaphor. When Fox guards the henhouse, the price of eggs goes up.