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The role of the worrisome warnings of President Donald Trump regarding the caravan of migrants Going to the American border from Central America, inspiring the virulent anti-Semitism that killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, highlights the destructive consequences of Fox Fox's attack on Fox.
While Robert D. Bowers, the man accused of mass shooting, had criticized Trump for his lack of anti-Semitism, critics pointed out that the president had "fanned the Bowers fears among us," deploying incendiary and false rhetoric of the migrant caravan in hopes of strengthening the reputation of the Republican Party. "The shooter might have found a different reason to act another day," Adam Serwer wrote for L & # 39; Atlantic. "But he chose to act on Saturday and he apparently chose to act in response to a political fiction that the president himself chose to broadcast and that his supporters chose to amplify."
Trump, in turn, came into contact with this fiction via Fox's alarmist speech. President first public statements about the trailer came in response to a segment that he watched at the Fox News morning show "Fox and friendsAnd in the weeks that followed, his rhetoric and that of the Conservative network intensified.
For over a year, I am studying the Trump-Fox Feedback Loop, my mandate for how Fox News is sometimes able to set the national media agenda because the president monitors the network's programming, tweets in real time and adopts its own peculiarities. As the rest of the press struggles to cover Trump's comments, Fox's right-wing obsessions consume the information cycle, whether or not they are newsworthy. In this case, Fox News urged him to whip his followers into a frenzy about the caravan, and he did so. Nothing indicates that Fox News or Donald Trump puts an end to this campaign of fear.
Caravan form in Honduras on Friday 12 October. By October 15, it was already receive substantial coverage on Fox News. The next morning, in response to a report sure "Fox and friendsTrump released his first public statement on migrants, warning the Honduran government that he would cut off his aid if the caravan had not stopped. Trump's comment generated more coverage on both Fox News and other media. On Wednesday evening, October 17, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich appeared on Fox News and urged Republicans to make the caravan a key issue of the vote, saying "the left is impatient" for the Entrance to the caravan in the United States.
The next morning, "Fox & Friends" repeatedly repeated Gingrich's comments and suggested that Republicans follow his advice. In response, Trump released a series of tweets using the advance of the caravan to attack Democrats, claiming that they had "directed (because they want open borders and weak laws in force)" an "assault on our country".
The network and its most powerful visualizer spent the next week raising the temperature, stoking fears of whether the the migrants were criminals or terrorists, calling the caravan an "invasion" and describing its approach as a national emergency. The escalation sparked a new escalation, with no sign of a line beyond which the president and his propagandists would not go.
Trump's comment on Fox has turned the history of the caravan into a major national report as journalists sought to explain and contextualize what he was talking about. But, at first glance, the situation does not justify the coverage received by the caravan. Migrants are currently in southern Mexico, their numbers are decrease and, according to which road the caravan chooses, they will have to make a trip from 1,000 to 2,000 miles to the US border that will take weeks or even months. Those who go to the border have the right to ask for asylum and those whose applications are rejected will be turned back. That's what happened when a similar caravan – which also attracted vitriol from Fox News and then Trump – reaches the US border in May. The caravans lasted about a decade no problem. There is no crisis except the one that Fox News and Trump sought to create in order to get GOP voters to the polls.
I have already mentioned the dangers of a president who relies on conservative cable operators to help him understand the news. When federal policy and staff Changes may be pipe by a presidential whim inspired by the Fox, the influence of the network is staggering. The biggest risk is that Trump could use his Unilateral control of the US nuclear arsenal in response to a Fox segment; Trump was would have pissed off By B-roll, the launch network of a North Korean missile aired in March 2017 was convinced that it was happening live. But on a daily basis, the main concern is that the president is a demagogue who is constantly striving against his alleged enemies to gain support from his base, and Fox News programming provides him with targets for his anger, whether to protest NFL players or recalcitrant officials of the Ministry of Justice. This pattern has been repeated many times since Trump came to the presidency.
"Normally," writes Serwer, "a politician can not be held responsible for the acts of a deranged adept". Similarly, it does not make sense to attribute the actions of a president to a press network. But Trump is suggestible, he constantly watches Fox News and network commentators are aware of it. In clearer moments, the "Fox & Friends" joke about the president's tendency to watch programs. In the heaviest cases, program commentators openly offer him advice, telling him do not sit down with special advocate Robert Mueller or remove the troops from Syria.
But on the Monday following the murder of the synagogue, nothing had changed. The migrants were again drawing cover on "Fox & Friends" ("The border battle is raging as the caravan heads for the United States," reads in a chyron). And a few hours later, Trump tweeted that the migrants were leading "an invasion of our country".
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