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Fox News stuck with their regular diet of Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity.
Wednesday evening’s coverage of the first day of the Senate’s impeachment trial of Donald Trump produced no surprises. CNN and MSNBC aired the trial—which is to say, the House managers’ presentation of their case for removing Trump from office—from gavel to gavel. Fox News didn’t broadcast the trial at all, preferring to stick with their regular diet of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. During the recesses, though, all three networks covered at least some of the live comments that senators and lawyers made to the press. All three covered the comments of Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow, who disparaged the formidable case that the House managers were laying out. That left Fox viewers in the odd position of hearing a critique of a case that Fox had not actually let them hear.
Today, in its lower-rated daytime “straight” coverage, Fox has been covering the trial. But nighttime is when Fox makes its money, with its higher-rated presentations of calumnies and fictions from Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham.
Fox’s role as the nation’s leading source of counterfactual “facts” is nothing new. In 2003, a survey from the University of Maryland–affiliated Program on International Policy Attitudes asked Americans some simple questions about the ongoing Iraq War—whether it had been shown that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al-Qaeda, whether U.S. forces had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and so on. Regular viewers of Fox News answered those questions wrongly far more than their compatriots who mainly got their news from other sources. Indeed, the survey concluded, the more that people watched Fox News, the more they misunderstood.
Now, Fox is dealing with the president’s impeachment trial by not airing the case against him during prime viewership times. It will be interesting to see if the same rule applies when the president’s lawyers present their case, such as it is. Epistemic closure, thy name is Fox.
