Fox News: The South Carolina Primary, A Trump Town Hall and the Migrant Invasion
A condensed overview of 21 hour of Fox News for the week ending 2/25/24
Fox News celebrated Donald J. Trump’s victory in the South Carolina primary as it fueled fears of an invasion of violent criminals from unstable and dangerous nations streaming across the U.S. southern border.
The network seems to flourish in the twisted combination of expressing joy about Trump and the MAGA movement while filling its viewers’ heads with fear, paranoia, and dread - everything is wonderful while everything is terrible.
The solution to every problem is the loudmouth man with the spray tan who will conquer the world by being the ultimate victim.
Anyone getting their news exclusively from Fox News last week might have missed out on several updates in the Israel-Hamas war, possible war crimes in Sudan and a New York civil case that found the NRA mishandled millions of dollars in funds.
Shows I covered on Fox News last week:
Fox & Friends
The Five
The Ingraham Angle
Fox & Friends Weekend - all four hours
The South Carolina Primary special
Laura Ingraham Stopped Trump from Lying About the 2020 Election
On Tuesday Laura Ingraham moderated a town hall featuring former President Donald J. Trump. She included questions from the audience which is something her co-worker has not done when he’s hosted similar events with Trump.
Fox openly admitted that the program was pre-taped. I noticed several obvious edits in the broadcast. It wasn’t until the second time I re-visited the town hall that I noticed Ingraham blatantly cutting Trump off.
“We're in a swamp. I'll tell you what, I've. I did great in the first election. I did much better in the second,” said Trump.
Ingraham abruptly interrupted by basically talking over him.
“We have interesting news coming out of New York, by the way, the New York poll that just came out.”
It appeared she was playing to his vanity by distracting him with a favorable poll. I suspect she was told by Fox News executives to steer Trump away from talking about fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
In April 2023 Fox News settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million in a defamation suit the company filed against the network for promoting false stories about its role in the 2020 election.
According to court documents related to the lawsuit Fox News executives and on-air talent admitted under oath they didn’t believe several guest’s claims about the 2020 election but promoted them anyway for the sake of ratings.
The network is still staring down the barrel of an even larger defamation suit from Smartmatic another voting systems company. Smartmatic is suing Fox News for $2.7 billion while Fox has filed a countersuit against the company saying it intended to suppress free speech.
A Diner Full of Members of the Cult Trump
On Saturday on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” Ainsley Earhardt was in her element as she dashed between tables at the Lizard’s Thicket, her hometown diner in Columbia, South Carolina for a primary day Breakfast with Friends segment.
The room was filled with mostly pale folks over the age of 70 clad in outfits that pushed the boundaries of violating the flag code.
I selected a few memorable quotes from the entire four hour broadcast from “Fox & Friends Weekend.”
The smiling blonde Fox News hosts started nearly every segment with a general question for the crowd “This is definitely Trump country. How many of y'all are for Trump?” asked Earnhardt as most of the diner erupted in cheers.
“How many of y'all are for Nikki Haley?” Earnhardt asked the same group and received a much more tepid response.
Earnhardt walked up to an elderly man wearing a bright read MAGA cap and asked him who he was planning to vote for.
“Yeah. He's (Trump) a businessman. He makes decision. He signs the front of the check. And so he knows how to run a business and this country needs. ,” said the man.
“How about what's happening to him? They're trying to charge him. You know, it's $500 million,” said Earnhardt.
“It's obscene. I mean, it's jealousy,” said the man.
Ainsley then turned to an elderly woman with a neat gray bob who was wearing a navy- blue sweater with white stars over a red shirt.
Yeah. I'm voting for Donald J. Trump because I'm just. I love Trump,” the woman said in a thick Southern drawl.
Seated next to her was an older Asian American woman who was wearing a shirt with Trump’s name across the front of it in the shape of an elephant. She turned to the camera smiled brightly and said, “we need everybody to rally to get him some money for those lawsuits.”
Earnhardt then turned to a table of four older white folks who all cheerfully said they would vote for the former president before the last woman clad in an American flag themed scarf took her moment to elaborate about why she loved Trump so much.
“He's pro-America. God, family, country. He's a good man. And we need to bring him back immediately.”
For the last shot of the day Earnhardt assembled a group of young children and asked them to wave at the camera.
The Fox hosts waved and smiled. Earnhardt leaned the microphone towards one of the older kids in the group a blonde-haired boy probably around age eight or nine in a red Make America Great Again cap.
“Do you have a message?” asked Earnhardt.
“Hello? Hi. Donald, you know I like Donald Trump,” said the boy.
“Why do you like him?” as Earnhardt said this her co-hosts in the Fox News studio erupted into laughter.
“Because he does whatever he says he's going to do,” said the boy.
“Okay. Thank you. There you go. Y'all are famous. Now. You're on national television,” said Earnhardt as she smiled and turned back to the camera.
Trump Will Free Us from Communism
Earnhardt encountered a young man who seemed to think at some point the United States had a bloodless and uneventful communist revolution.
“Okay. And how about you, sir? You love Trump?” Earnhardt asked as she pointed a microphone towards a younger man in a bright red cap with the word Trump on it.
“Yes, ma'am. I'm John Allen, the third vice chair for the Lexington County Republican Party with Chairman Mark Weber and our first vice chair. We were actually the first county in all of South Carolina to endorse President Trump before the primary, which no one else did.
But my biggest issue is I don't think communism is coming to this country. I think we're living in a communist state. And Donald Trump is the only candidate and president who can take this country back. It's terrifying to me as a young voter because I'm thinking about my future, my kids’ futures. We need someone who's going to get us back on track. And Donald Trump is the only candidate who can do that,” said Allen.
Communism - as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
a: a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed b: a theory advocating elimination of private property
2 or Communism a: a doctrine based on revolutionary Marxian socialism and Marxism-Leninism that was the official ideology of the Soviet Union b : a totalitarian system of government in which a single authoritarian party controls state-owned means of production c: a final stage of society in Marxist theory in which the state has withered away and economic goods are distributed equitably
I would love to point out that Allen was sitting in a privately held business at the time he made his remark to a journalist on national television. Most communist governments aren’t big on private ownership of businesses, a free press, or public dissent of the government.
Ainsley Earhardt - Normal Americans Love Trump
On Tuesday on “Fox & Friends,” Ainsley Earhardt openly praised Trump.
“And people in South Carolina are telling me it depends on the neighborhood. If you go into some of the rural areas, they like Trump, you'll see all the Trump signs in their yard. If you go into some of the rural and the more of the city areas where you do have the college educated individuals, you have people with larger houses, they have Nikki Haley signs in front of them.
But we have a lot of blue-collar workers in South Carolina. South Carolinians just love that state. And they go to church on Sunday they are happy just putting food on their table, saying their blessing with their kids, putting their kids to bed and giving them a normal life. Just a regular life. There’s not a ton a ton of wealth in South Carolina.
So, you know, they love Trump down there. They like what he stands for. And South Carolinians, they love to hunt, they love to fish, They love church. And they like Donald Trump. They like Nikki Haley. She was she was our governor twice. And. Right. And they do like her. They like Tim Scott. But they just love how Trump is so strong.”
According to the U.S. Census about 80% of Americans live in or near an urban area in the United States and 23.5% have at least a bachelor’s degree.
The Pew Research Center found nearly 1/3 of Americans don’t identify as religious while the number of adults under 50 who do not plan to have children has also risen to 44%. According to a study by North Carolina State in 2021 only about 11.5 million or 4% of Americans actively participated in hunting as a hobby.
The ‘normal’ American Earhardt described is far less common than she might realize.
Fox Heavily Pushed a Murder Case Involving a Migrant Suspect
Last Thursday Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at the University of Georgia was murdered while running on campus. Her body was found soon after she was reported missing in the woods behind Lake Herrick.
Police quickly apprehended Jose Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old immigrant from Venezuela. He entered the U.S. unlawfully in 2022 and was paroled and released for further processing, according to immigration authorities, CBS reported. Police have reported that Ibarra did not know Riley before the attack and have called the attack a crime of opportunity.
Fox News reported on story as soon as Riley’s body was found. On Saturday the network included six segments about the attack during the four hours of “Fox & Friends Weekend.”
Nearly every time Fox News producers introduced the story they led with Ibarra’s immigration status. Many of the segments began with this exact language.
“Fox News alert. Police revealing that a man accused of killing that nursing student in Georgia is not a U.S. citizen.”
Normally the most important detail to begin a breaking story like this would be that the suspect was in police custody.
Fox also invited former ICE director Tom Homan to discuss the case during two different extended segments over the four hour broadcast. Homan designed the family separation program during the Trump administration. The program forcibly separated children from their parents as a means to deter illegal border crossings.
For the entire four hours Fox spend 21% of its coverage on the story. In addition to the six segments about the crime Riley’s murder was also brought up during interviews with Sean Hannity of Fox News and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC).
Words used in the four-hour broadcast of “Fox & Friends Weekend.”
Biden - 60
Border - 60
Illegal - 44
Murder - 30
Riley - 25
Citizen - 23
Venezuela -15
Fox News used the terms border, illegal, and murder more than the victim’s name.
At one point Pete Hegseth was disgusted that other networks and media outlets included segments that warned about the dangers of running alone.
“We'll watch the media very carefully as they try to paint this as something other than illegal enters country and kills a U.S. citizen,” said Hegseth.
Another layer to the story is that according to reporting by Politico, two days before he left office, Donald J. Trump signed the Deferred Enforced Departure program, or DED, to offer temporary legal status to Venezuelans fleeing the humanitarian crisis brought on by Nicolás Maduro’s regime.
According to reporting by Newsweek an ex-former Trump staffer, A.J. Delgado, wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter)
"You're going to see a lot of #MAGA folks on here, who are claiming that #Biden has "blood on his hands" due to the suspect in the Atlanta-nursing-student's murder being an illegal immigrant from Venezuela who reportedly arrived in 2022. Except... #whoops: It seems *TRUMP* is the one to blame, if anyone is other than, you know, the murderer," Delgado wrote.
It’s hard to know if Ibarra was still in the United States due to policies enacted during the Biden or Trump administrations as Biden also offered some Temporary Protected Status to an estimated 472,000 Venezuelans.
Fox News and other right-wing media outlets will likely use this crime as an example of the dangers of immigration immigrants commit less crime than American citizens.
According to reporting by the Independent between 2012 and 2018, undocumented migrants in Texas were less than half as likely to commit violent crimes than those born in the US, according to a widely cited, peer-reviewed study from 2020.
Venezuela is Emptying Out its Prisons! Who Needs Proof! We Know It’s Happening!
On Saturday on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” Rachel Campos-Duffy made a claim that her co-hosts repeated throughout the rest of program.
“First of all, if you know anything about Venezuela, Cuba controls Venezuela on a large scale. And yes, of course, Cuba is suffering. I mean, Venezuela is suffering economically. The last thing they they need is to keep these guys, these criminals alive in their prisons. An easy thing to do is just let them go. Our border is wide open. Most Hispanics believe that's exactly what happened. What's happened, and that's a conversation that's being had in our communities right now,” said Campos-Duffy.
The word prison appeared 12 times in the transcript for “Fox & Friends Weekend,” on Saturday. At no time during the broadcast did any of the hosts offer any tangible proof that the Venezuelan government was purposefully releasing prisoners into the United States.
Stories Fox News Ignored
Every week I compare the hours I’ve watched on Fox News to five hours of the PBS NewsHour. The following list are stories that PBS covered that Fox News did not. This week the list is slightly truncated due to space in the newsletter.
Updates in the War in Ukraine
The Ukrainian military has withdrawn from two villages near the eastern town of Avdiivka which was recently taken by the Russians. Residents in the area also fled.
Updates in Israel-Hamas War
Twenty-six European Union countries called for a humanitarian cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war. Hungary was the lone holdout.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry 29,000 people have died in Gaza since the start of the war. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant casualties.
The U.S. vetoed a U.N. resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza. The U.S. said it would interfere with negotiations on a deal to free hostages abducted in Israel.
The U.N.’s top court is hearing the final arguments in a case challenging Israel's 56-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Israeli strikes killed at least 67 Palestinians in Gaza, including in areas where civilians were told to seek refuge.
The United Nations' World Food Programme (WFP) announced a pause in food and aid deliveries to northern Gaza on Tuesday after its drivers faced gunfire and violence from desperate residents swarming the trucks.
The Israel legislature backed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rejection of any "unilateral" recognition of a Palestinian state. The Israeli position says any permanent accord with the Palestinians must be reached through direct negotiations between the sides and not by international dictates.
The annual migration of red crabs in Australia is two months behind schedule due to severely dry conditions. Most experts blame man made climate change.
True the Vote, an advocacy group that has spread false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election admitted in a Georgia court that they had no evidence to back up their claims. The group was used to back up false claims in the documentary “2000 Mules” produced by convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza was convicted of a campaign finance violation in 2014 and received a pardon from former President Donald J. Trump.
The Supreme Court declined to hear a case about admissions policies in a Virginia magnet high school that were meant to increase racial diversity. The case was brought by the parents of Asian American students who felt the policy was discriminatory against their children.
A South Carolina man was found guilty of a hate crime for killing a transgender woman because of her gender identity. It was the first federal hate crime trial that was based on gender identity.
Tensions increased in the Taiwan Strait last week following incidents near an island involving the Chinese and Taiwanese coast guards.
In India police fired tear gas at protesting farmers marching towards the nation’s capital. As the gas dispersed thousands of farmers fled into nearby fields about 125 miles North of New Delhi.
In Spain farmers drove tractors into central Madrid on Wednesday as part of ongoing protests against European Union and local farming policies.
So far in the 2024 presidential race Joe Biden’s campaign entered February with nearly $56 million in cash reserves while Trump had little more than $30 million.
The Albanian Parliament voted for a deal where Albania would hold up to 36,000 of asylum seekers for Italy each year for five years. Albania would shelter up to 3,000 migrants rescued from international waters at any one time.
A judge in Texas found that a school district acted within the law when it suspended a Black student over his hairstyle.
A federal judge blocked a California law that would allow residents, state and local governments to sue gun makers over "abnormally dangerous" guns. The judge cited the laws as being likely unconstitutional.
Nex Benedict, a non-binary 16-year-old died after being physically beaten during a bullying episode in a girl’s bathroom in a suburban Tulsa high school in Oklahoma. Benedict’s exact cause of death is still under investigation. Nex Benedict died the day after the attack.
A jury in New York State found that the former CEO of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, along with other executives mismanaged finances at the nonprofit. According to the lawsuit LaPierre and other executives used the nonprofit to enrich themselves personally.
The U.S. and South Korea are planning an 11-day military exercise on the Korean Peninsula beginning next week as tensions continue to rise with North Korea.
A new report by the U.N. Human Rights Council found evidence that scores of people, including children, have been subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence in the ongoing conflict in Sudan that might amount to war crimes.
Kenya held a state funeral for Kelvin Kiptum, a world marathon record holder. Kiptum died in a car accident earlier this month. He was only 24 years old. Hundreds of dignitaries including the president of Kenya attended his funeral along with thousands of mourners.
Hydeia Broadbent, an HIV/AIDS activist died Feb. 20 at a neurological rehabilitation center. She was 39. Broadbent was born with HIV and developed AIDS at age five and spent most of her life advocating for HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention. She was one of the first pediatric patients to receive AZT other antiretroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS.