Decoding Fox News

When Donald J. Trump first starred on The Apprentice, over twenty years ago, the show was a surprise hit. The creative team managed to make its narcissistic, petty and cruel host likable. The show’s creator, Mark Burnett, also made viewers forget that Donald J. Trump was the same man who had a slew of business failures throughout his career including six bankruptcies involving failed casinos and t...

Months ago, I decided to go through all 117 Trump campaign rallies from 2023-2024. Each event is about 90 minutes long, so it’s been quite an undertaking. I’ve only gotten through 72. I wanted to see patterns in how he spun his exaggerations and lies to send his followers down the MAGA rabbit hole. Although Trump is a natural salesman in many ways, he’s had so many business failures that it’s asto...

As Trump travels across the country to give speeches in mostly deeply red states his propaganda machine is running out of ideas. The network has tried every way possible to lift the president’s sagging poll numbers and boost Republican candidates in the midterm elections. It’s not working. Most polls continue to favor Democrats even in races that Republicans would have won easily four years ago. S...

Last week Fox News continued to scramble to come up with content that would keep its viewers’ eyes on the screen while it avoided unpleasant news for Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party. The latest jobs report was dismal, the president’s approval ratings hit a record low and polling for Republican candidates continued to drop. The Network tried to distract its audience with segments about Nat...

Normally at this point in an election year Fox News includes segments with photogenic and well-spoken voters who say glowing things about President Trump and the Republican Party. Fox News normally loves to welcome a bunch of hand-selected folks from various backgrounds to sit in neat rows on the Fox & Friends set and share their thoughts about an upcoming election. There’s always a couple of mode...

It’s getting more obvious by the day on Fox News that the MAGA dream is dying and the network has given up on trying to revive it. For weeks the folks on the network have tried to send signals to Trump that voters weren’t happy with the war in Iran or the state of the economy. It hasn’t worked. As Americans struggle to pay for gas and groceries their glorious leader threatens to destroy The Kenned...

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Last week as the Republican Party held a 14-hour Midterm election extravaganza Fox News, the network most closely aligned with the president and the GOP, downplayed the event. Instead of focusing its cameras on the speakers who appeared live onstage at the convention the network spent most of its airtime on a luxury box at the American Airlines Center. There in a makeshift television studio Fox Ne...

Every now and then I see cracks in the matrix of the well-formed Fox News propaganda apparatus. President Trump’s many manic social media posts, the failing war in Iran and his rapidly sinking poll numbers are all taking their toll on the network. Fox News hosts are tired of the nonstop chaos that is Trump 2.0. Last week multiple Fox News hosts appeared to almost malfunction as they spoke openly a...

If desperation had a scent all of Midtown Manhattan would be overwhelmed from the stench generated by Fox News headquarters. What started out as a dream for the network on January 20, 2025, has turned into a nightmare of another never-ending war in the Middle East, high gas prices, a rise in the popularity of socialism, and a mentally declining president who is more focused on his vanity projects...

Fox News took things to another level last week in the network’s attempts to avoid talking about Trump’s disastrous war in the Middle East, high gas prices, a sluggish economy and the president’s obsession with his gilded building projects. The network spent over 1/3 of its airtime on the shows I covered last week trashing Democrats mostly Abdul El-Sayed and Angie Nixon. Nixon is a talented and ch...

For weeks the folks at Fox kept telling their audience that diehard communist revolutionaries were on a mission to destroy the American way of life. The movement started in deep blue congressional districts in New York City but was quickly spreading across the nation to envelop the heartland. Thanksgiving celebrations would be canceled; football games would be replaced by Pagan transgender drum ci...

Last week Fox News attempted to revive long since dead horrors for its audience - the COVID-19 pandemic, outrage over a transgender athlete scandal that did NOT include a transgender athlete and commies, commies and more commies. In late June the Supreme Court ruled that states were allowed to ban transgender athletes from K-12 and colligate sports programs for women and girls. This essentially ba...

As the president’s ill-conceived conflict with Iran becomes more unstable and chaotic his personal propaganda machine has run out of ways to spin it to its viewers. Last week the network was more than happy to hype up a personal vendetta Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has against Dr. Anthony Fauci, formerly the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Sen. Rand Paul...

Most of the folks at Fox News last week looked like they would rather endure a drug-free root canal performed by a trained chimpanzee than talk about Trump’s disastrous war in Iran. The conflict that was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks has dragged on for months with no real end in sight. More American troops have paid the ultimate sacrifice as Iran managed to strike U.S. a military base i...

Last week the folks at Fox News seemed like the frustrated parents of a juvenile delinquent son who was caught setting his high school principal’s car on fire. The network had no problem spinning measles outbreaks, the Epstein files coverup, the murder of Iranian school children, the mass pardon of cop beaters, the president’s insider trading, self-dealing, foreign bribes, vanity projects, or his...

Last week on Fox News guests and hosts alike seemed to all come up with the exact same conspiracy theory about the Democratic Party and control of the U.S. Senate. According to the Fox News narrative party leaders decided to pick a deeply flawed yet charismatic blue collar oyster farmer, Graham Platner, to run for the U.S. Senate in Maine. The second he started to dip in the polls the Democratic m...

Last week Fox News hosts attempted to marry the glory of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States with the lurking danger of an impending domestic communist revolution. Never mind that Americans are super shoppers in many ways as approx. 70% of the U.S. economy is based on consumer spending. The folks on Fox News think the largest free market economy in the world is about to coll...

When things aren’t going well for President Donald J. Trump Fox News has a few tools in its arsenal to keep its viewers terrified, paranoid and glued to their television sets. One of the network’s biggest propaganda weapons of mass distraction is the fear of a communist revolution in the United States. So far this year the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) endorsed 150 candidates in primary e...

Trump’s proposed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the U.S. and Iran is so dreadful that even the network that helped get him elected cannot muster much enthusiasm for it. The producers at Fox & Friends trotted out several experts who said the pending agreement was worse than no deal between the two countries. Brian Kilmeade even snapped an experienced military expert who tried to downplay...

The Fox News propaganda machine normally promotes the same triumphant rhetoric for its glorious leader. The network portrays President Donald J. Trump as a master negotiator, a maverick and an unconventional leader who is changing the world through his unique personality and force of will. All of Trump’s flaws are excused as part of his genius. His many deficiencies are completely ignored. The net...

Last week the folks on Fox News promoted Republican candidates as if they were public relations specialists hired directly by their campaigns to create negative ads about their opponents. As we approach the midterm elections Fox News is ramping up its propaganda to aggressive and unapologetic Agitprop (Agitation and Propaganda Section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party) levels. As the...

Last week the folks at Fox News put most of their focus on promoting Republican candidates across the country. The network didn’t praise GOP hopefuls as much as it trashed Democrats. James Talarico, a U.S. Senate candidate in Texas, was presented as a politically radical girly soy boy who munched on vegan burgers and thought that God was transgender. Graham Platner, a U.S. Senate candidate in Main...

Fox News started last week predicting a massive U.S. military campaign that would crush Iran and end Trump’s gamble in the Middle East. Within 24 hours Trump declared another pause in the conflict which forced Fox News to pivot to more mundane topics. By mid-week the war wasn’t even a major story. The network’s highest rated show The Five didn’t even include a single segment about the war for the...

Anyone tuning into Fox News last week might think the channel had converted to a home shopping network that sold only one product - the glorious leader himself Donald J. Trump. The president was treated like an overpriced trinket. “Look at how he stands next to Xi Jinping. Observe how his tiny makeup covered hands touch the Chinese leader’s! Such majesty!” It wouldn’t have surprised me if Fox shif...