[ad_1]
The Guardian
As the White House changes hands, Fox News’ support for the presidency will also change
After four years of servile promotion of the President and the White House, the right-wing media will take a sharp about-face When Joe Biden is sworn in as president on January 20, viewers can witness one of the 180 turns most dramatic degrees in history. Four years of servile promotion of the president, Fox News is expected to pump the brakes seconds after the inauguration ceremony. Suddenly the person in the White House is not a Republican. More than that, the network can no longer count on the willingness of the president or his aides to call on Fox News at any time of the day or night.The right-wing TV channel and its great hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity will spend the next four years as an opposition party. The network has done this before, of course – Barack Obama’s eight-year presidency weren’t that long ago – but Biden presents a different challenge. “Sure, we can expect him to be relentlessly negative, but it’s a challenge on some levels. , because he’s a 78-year-old white man, quite a moderate story, “said Heather Hendershot, an MIT film and media professor who studies conservative and right-wing media.” In the past, they attacked Hillary Clinton very harshly not only for being a liberal, but obviously there was an underlying sexism and misogyny there – and obviously the fact that Barack Obama was African American was at the heart of right-wing attacks on him, implicitly or explicitly, including on Fox News. This does not mean evading attack, even if he dodges the worst. Kamala Harris will be black’s first vice president and could become a target for Fox News hosts. If Democrats win both Senate second-round elections in Georgia, the Senate will be split 50 to 50, and Harris will vote with a deciding vote.[If that happens] she’s going to be in the foreground as a tiebreaker in Congress over and over again, “Hendershot said.” And every time that happens it’s a way to tangentially attack Biden – it gives [Fox News and other rightwing outlets] a kind of “red meat” to attack Kamala Harris, because she is both a woman and a person of color. Biden claims he has named “the most diverse cabinet ever announced in American history,” with Janet Yellen set to be The first woman to be Treasury Secretary, while Lloyd Austin , if confirmed, is set to become black first secretary of defense, with occasional Fox News guest Pete Buttigieg expected to be the openly gay first cabinet secretary as transport chief. Fox News has attacked another diverse group of Democrats before: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and other non-white female members of Congress. Matthew Gertz, senior researcher at Media Matters for America, a media watchdog, said that it was a theme. who has continued to dominate even since Biden became president-elect. “A lot of what we’re seeing right now is less focused on Joe Biden himself and more on this idea that he’s going to be somehow a puppet for other personalities that they find easier to attack – sharpen. she who is Kamala Harris, or Bernie Sanders, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “Gertz said.” It’s an angle they’ve followed a lot during the campaign, and it’s something they’ve focused on during the transition as well. The news was credited with helping fuel the growth of the Tea Party movement in 2010, which was the first way for right-wing freaks to gain greater influence within the Republican Party. The attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi in 2012 has become a long time. Fox News article, even as the administration was cleared – by a Republican-controlled House committee – of any wrongdoing. “We have seen to some extent how it will happen. Looking back to 2009, 2010, the early years of the Obama administration featured a lot of incredibly overheated and conspiratorial Fox News commentary. I think this is probably an area they will be happy to return to. “Gertz said.” This will likely be a source for the scandal we saw under the Obama administration – essentially a return to coverage of Benghazi, where the network takes a current event and spend months, months, years and years thinking about it and telling their audiences that the Democratic administration is the source of horrific action. Clearly, moving from supporting one president to opposing the next is not without precedent. Liberal cable news networks will have experienced something similar when Trump was elected in 2016 – although CNN and MSNBC were never the same quasi-propaganda groups for Obama that Fox News was for Trump. Yet more liberal news organizations have spiked in popularity. , and an increase in viewing figures, after Trump’s victory. MSNBC and CNN saw double-digit growth in viewing figures after Trump’s victory, while Atlantic, The New Yorker and ProPublica all saw saw a boost in readers. Fox News declined to comment, but a spokeswoman pointed to Nielsen ratings showing the network is still the most watched cable news channel. Hendershot said Fox News could see a similar advantage for its most popular rivals. to the left once it is in opposition to the White. House. “Politicized media, whether magazines or opinion, smaller like the [left-leaning] Nation or the [conservative] National Review, or bigger ones like Fox News, they tend to prosper financially the more opposed they are, “said Hendershot.” They’ll have to increase their opposition, by virtue of Biden being president – and at the same time, they can have their cake and eat it too, as long as they don’t lose Trump as a story because he will continue to promote himself, mistakenly, as the real president in exile. “” So they can do very well financially and politically, because they can not only attack Biden, they can swing really hard against Kamala Harris, and they can also continue to work on the Trump story, trying to satisfy this base, because Trump is not going to disappear.
Source link
