Fox News - The Latest Fake Clinton Scandal, Canadian Truckers and Russian Propaganda
Decoding Fox News – 15 hours of Fox News Dissected and Analyzed Week Ending 2/20/22
This is a condensed breakdown in fifteen hours of Fox News media from Monday February 14th to Friday February 18th. Since this is my first week doing this, I thought I would focus on a new show every day in addition to covering the first hour of Fox & Friends and daily episodes of The Five.
The other shows I surveyed:
Tucker Carlson Tonight
Hannity
The Ingraham Angle
Prime Time with Jesse Watters
Gutfeld!
The focus of last week’s coverage was the usual COVID-19 conspiracy theories, the trucker blockade in Canada and an invented story about Hillary Clinton spying on the Trump campaign, and a general downplaying of the Ukrainian/Russia crisis.
By comparison here were the top five news topics on a non-partisan news source the PBS NewsHour. This week the only overlap was Ukraine which the two networks handled very differently. PBS took a sober and serious approach to the conflict whereas Fox downplayed it.
Last week deep dive into Fox News started with a 12 and half minute story on Fox & Friends about the Super Bowl that was really outrage about mask mandates. The anchors Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade and Ainsley Earhardt showed clips of celebrities without face masks at the Super Bowl. This was seen as an outrage and turned into an extended diatribe about the evils of mask mandates in schools. The game itself was barely mentioned.
Ainsley Earhardt read the following tweet by Clay Travis, a political commentator who makes frequent guest spots on various Fox News programs.
This was one of two references of mask mandates in schools being equated to child abuse.
Canadian truckers
While the Ukrainian conflict was viewed as a hyped up diversion to distract from Biden’s many shortcomings, the Canadian trucker blockade was presented as brave patriots standing up to a tyrannical regime.
Fox left out that the blockade is incredibly unpopular among Canadians and that 90% of truckers are already vaccinated.
Despite their usual pro-business stance Fox commentators also left out the many businesses and industries that were being harmed by the blockade.
Durham Report - The New Fake Clinton Scandal
“The Clinton campaign paid lawyers to infiltrate the Trump Tower servers and then later the servers at the White House,” Ainsley Earhardt Fox & Friends 2/14/22.
As soon as I heard Earnhardt’s quote about Clinton allegedly hiring lawyers to infiltrate servers at Trump Tower, I knew the story was bogus. If Clinton wanted to hack into a server she would need to hire hackers, not lawyers.
The Durham Report was created by former president Donald J. Trump and his Attorney General Bill Barr. The purpose of the investigation was to find evidence of a conspiracy against Trump. In many ways the Durham Report was Trump’s attempt to counter The Mueller Report.
So far, The Durham Report hasn’t turned up much of anything.
Nearly anything involving a political campaign is publicly accessible. The entire premise seemed far-fetched as most lawyers wouldn’t exactly explain in paperwork that anyone could access that they were openly breaking the law.
Lawyers also do not hack into servers. Hackers hack into servers. It’s also not exactly easy to hack into a private server at Trump Tower. It would be extraordinarily difficult to hack into the server at the White House.
To quote Charlie Savage at the NYTimes “The entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news…(his conclusions) based on misleading presentation of the facts, or outright misinformation.”
The information obtained from the White House was from the Obama Administration. The company was looking for malware and threats to the White House network. The data in the filing is from 2016, before Trump was president.
The Fox personalities also acted outraged that no other media company other than those owned by Rupert Murdoch (NYPost, and WSJ) were covering the story.
This type of story is perfect for Fox News because it’s complicated and not easily explained away in a sentence. The filing doesn’t say what they claim it says. Durham has distanced himself from these wild assumptions. There’s nothing in his filings about Clinton’s campaign spying on the Trump campaign or hacking into the server at Trump Tower.
Sources that debunk the Durham story.
Since this story is a bit complicated I’ve included a short list of stories that explore this topic in depth.
CNN – Right-Wing media said it was exposing a scandal. What it really revealed is how bad information spreads in MAGA world – Brian Stelter
NYTimes – Court Filing Started a Furor in Right-Wing Outlets but Their Narrative Is Off Track – Charlie Savage
NPR – The John Durham filing that set off conservative media, explained – Audio – Ryan Lucas
Another Fake Story
Seemingly out of thin air multiple Fox personalities claimed that Hillary Clinton is planning to run for president again.
Hillary Clinton has not indicated that she’s going to run for president she simply gave a speech to NY Democrats.
The Fox anchors seemed gleeful at the prospect of having their perfect political foe to bash every day. They presented no actual evidence to their wild prediciton except to give vague comments about her body language and the tone of her voice as proof or her presidential ambitions.
Crime, crime, crime and more crime - Defund the Police!
To believe the anchors at Fox News New York City and every other major metropolitan area is a dangerous hellscape of lawless chaos. Fox News never met a crime story they didn’t love, especially an urban crime story. Crime stories were mentioned so often on every show it was hard to keep track of all of them.
On Fox and Friends they also featured a segment where they claimed that Nancy Pelosi was lying when she said that the Defund the Police movement was not part of the party platform. The hosts showed clips of members of the progressive caucus known as “The Squad” saying they supported Defund the Police as a means of proof that Pelosi was lying.
The Squad only constitutes six members of the House of Representatives and no Senators.
The phrase - Defund the Police - is not found anywhere on the Democratic Party platform. Individual Democrats can have their own views regarding police reform but Nancy Pelosi was accurate when she said Defund the Police is not the official policy of the party.
Here’s a clip of the misleading story.
Clip of the week - An actual Reporter Scolds The Five
The clip of the week was a jaw-dropper. This past Friday after the panel of The Five had blathered on about Ukriane for an extended period of time, Jennifer Griffin, the National Security Correspondent for Fox News showed up in a pop-up screen to add her insight on the Ukraine/Russia crisis. Up until that point everyone on the panel completely dismissed the threat Ukriane was facing, and Kennedy, the former VJ and Fox host, even went so far as to claim the Ukraine/Russia crisis was manufactured as a means to distract from the recent findings in the Durham probe.
“It’s Jake Sullivan, Jake Sullivan is the National Security Advisor, he’s in deep yogurt for the Durham probe and he’s been the one saying we have so much intelligence an invasion is imminent. He said that last Friday. It’s the next Friday and here we are. I don’t think Putin is going to invade,” said Kennedy.
Shortly after Kennedy’s statement, Griffin unleashed her fury on the entire panel starting with,
“Well, Jesse, I think first of all I need to level set with the conversation. I've just been listening to what we're witnessing right now. It's not something that just changed in the last 24 hours. If you go back to notes that I've been sending out for the last two weeks,” said Griffin before she then went on for an extended four-minute diatribe chastising the entire panel for their cavalier attitude towards the crisis.
When Griffin was finished the show cut to commercial and nothing she said was referenced by anyone.
Dubious Expert of the Week
The Fox News network will often invite their regular commentators to talk about nearly any subject even if that person has no expertise in whatever they are asked to speak about.
This week, comedian Adam Carolla was brought on to discuss a story about school board members who were recalled in San Francisco. Carolla doesn’t have children in the San Francisco school district, but he took the time to discuss the science behind mask mandates and the virus.
“But here's what I was thinking about as I was driving away from all these idiots wearing their masks outside which don't work. Aren't you guys, teachers? Where's the science? What are you teaching these kids? This could be a teachable moment; we could learn a lot. But instead, they're just scaring them and scarring them. They're literally scaring these kids, which are going to leave scars,” said Carolla.
Stories and topics ignored
While Fox loves to focus on certain topics such as invented presidential campaigns by retired politicians they also ignore stories that got a lot of coverage last week.
The most glaring examples.
The Sandy Hook settlement
The families of the victims in the Sandy Hook shooting won a $73 million settlement against the gun makers who manufactured the gun that was used to kill their children. There was absolutely no mention of this on any Fox program that I surveyed.
The Olympic games
The Olympics received exactly two mentions in 15 hours of coverage.
The sentencing of Kim Potter
The police officer who fatally shot Duante Wright, a Black motorist, during a traffic stop was sentenced to only 2 years in prison.
The Sarah Palin libel suit against the New York Times
Palin’s case was tossed out of court by a judge. Most major media outlets at least mentioned it.
The ongoing trial of three officers involved in the death of George Floyd
Thomas Lane, Tou Thao, and Alexander Kueng who did nothing to stop Derek Chauvin as he kneeled on George Floyd’s neck until he died. They are being prosecuted for violating Floyd’s civil rights and depriving him of medical care.
By the numbers
I made a giant transcript of all 15 hours and then did a search for specific words to see how many times they came up. This is also how I double checked for stories that weren’t covered on the shows I surveyed.
Hillary Clinton was mentioned 94 times.
A quote Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made about criminals stealing baby formula was played repeatedly across the entire platform. AOC or some form of her name came up 33 times.
Trump was mentioned 204 times whereas Biden only got 137 mentions. Socialism/socialist was brought up 8 times.
For next week my plan is to cover Fox & Friends, The Five and Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Well-done. Seems like a good way to get tension headaches, though. Ha. Hang in there.
“…they're just scaring them and scarring them. They're literally scaring these kids, which are going to leave scars”… I hope Carolla isn’t holding his breath waiting for that Pulitzer. Excellent launch! The stats are interesting. Looking forward to more.