Fox News Is Losing Its Grip
Fox News Is Losing Its Grip
The network is desperately downplaying the biggest political drama of our time—and viewers are tuning out.
By Will Oremus May 25 2017 1:26 PM
May 9, 2017, was a momentous day in American politics—unless you were watching Fox News.
Late that afternoon, President Trump stunned Washington by firing James Comey less than a week after the FBI director had testified to Congress about, among other things, the bureau’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russia. On the heels of that news came a rapid-fire series of revelations that cast the dismissal in lights ranging from sinister to farcical.
And indeed, to anyone watching the news on CNN or MSNBC, here was a real-life, high-stakes drama wrapped in layers of deception and absurdity, unfolding minute by minute, one jaw-dropping development after the next.
On Fox News, however, it was an altogether different story. Viewers of the nation’s most-watched cable network were told first that Comey had “resigned,” then that he had been fired and that the move was controversial.
But on show after show, from late afternoon into the night, the reasons for Comey’s dismissal and the nature of the controversy were glossed over, and the juicy details that followed went unmentioned. The network’s hosts almost unanimously treated Comey’s firing as a fully justified and unsurprising development and accepted wholesale the White House’s official explanation that Comey had been fired for cause. (Trump and his administration later changed their story multiple times.)
Last week, for the first time since Bill Clinton was president, Fox News came in last of the big three cable news networks in weekly prime-time ratings for the 25–54 demographic. MSNBC beat it in total prime-time viewership, too.
By steadfastly pooh-poohing the lies, scandals, outrage, and intrigue that have dominated the first months of Donald Trump’s remarkable presidency, the network is all but sitting out the most fascinating domestic political saga of our time. And increasingly, viewers are changing the channel.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/05/fox_news_refusal_to_cover_trump_s_scandals_makes_for_bad_ratings_and_boring.html
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