On her self-titled MSNBC show Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow used the current feud between Fox News and Donald Trump to attack the news network as nothing more than an arm of the Republican Party.
Maddow admitted that Fox was a “competitor of ours at MSNBC” but dismissed them as a news outlet and merely “Republican Party television. So we not only compete with them but we also cover them as a political entity, you have to if you want to cover Republican politics. So, in that context I have been covering FOX News as a Republican political entity for years now.”
The liberal MSNBC host appeared shocked that Fox News CEO Roger Ailes allegedly instructed all of his on-air hosts to tweet out their support for colleague Megyn Kelly following Trump’s repeated attacks on her and proclaimed “[s]ometimes the universe delivers poetic justice.”
Maddow portrayed the fight between Fox and Trump as “Frankenstein and his own monster, because when Donald Trump wanted to become a real candidate and not a celebrity, when he wanted to start being treated like a candidate, FOX News did that for him. They created this thing, which they are now fighting.”
Not content, the MSNBC host continued to dismiss Fox as an actual news network and beamed at the fight with Trump:
And the fight is happening on the exact terms that FOX News itself invented. Ignoring the substance totally and fighting on the basis of “my ratings are bigger, my poll numbers are bigger, therefore I can’t hear you and I don’t have to hear you.” That’s been pure FOX News for years now. And now, it is pure Donald Trump and it is the way that he’s at war with FOX News. The universe is a snake that eats its own tail.
In Maddow’s own head, not only is Fox “Republican Party television” but the network believes they will choose the party’s 2016 nominee, and any battle with Trump will ultimately result in a Fox win:
My personal sense is that FOX News will endure no matter who the Republican nominee is and there can be no Republican presidential nominee without FOX News championing them.
But that’s my personal take. I mean, if it’s true, then this has to end somewhere different than it is right now. If the Republican frontrunner and FOX are at war, then that person cannot be the Republican frontrunner anymore. FOX must win. I know it has to end that way someday. But I do not know how we get there.
Maddow’s insistence that Fox News is merely a mouthpiece for the Republican Party is quite amusing given her past statements that MSNBC has no political objective. In an interview with Slate.com in 2011, Maddow claimed that while “there may be liberals on TV at MSNBC” the “network is not operating with a political objective.”
In the interview, Maddow continued to spew the line that MSNBC’s hosts were not spewing talking points, unlike Fox:
I think that the new model in cable in news broadcasting is that when you hear a host talk, you are expecting that they are saying exactly what they believe...We are actually saying what we think. We are not playing a role. We are not being fake-objective. We are not being directed in political talking points in any way. That it’s us. That means management has to be hands off with all of us, because in order for you to believe that The Rachel Maddow Show is saying what this person named Rachel Maddow believes, there can’t be anybody else telling me what to say. So that’s the rule with everybody. Everybody gets to say their own piece.
See relevant transcript below.
MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show
August 25, 2015
RACHEL MADDOW: FOX News is a competitor of ours at MSNBC but, honestly, they’re also something unlike anything else in the media landscape. They are Republican Party television. So we not only compete with them but we also cover them as a political entity, you have to if you want to cover Republican politics.
So, in that context I have been covering FOX News as a Republican political entity for years now. And over all of those years that I have been covering them in that way, I cannot remember a time when they did anything like this before they did this today.The head of FOX News is Roger Ailes. He’s been chairman and CEO of FOX News for 19 years. He’s very skilled at his job. FOX has achieved unimaginable success both commercially and in terms of their political influence on the Republican Party under Roger Ailes’ iron-fisted direction at FOX.
But as far as I know, over all those years, Roger Ailes has never before responded to criticism in the way he did today. First, there was this blizzard from FOX News talent. Clearly, Mr. Ailes or somebody else at FOX News gave some sort of directive or suggestion or go ahead to the talent across the FOX News Channel that they should go ahead and criticize Donald Trump publicly, they should criticize him specifically for the way he went after that one FOX News host.
Almost simultaneously, there was just a torrent of statements from FOX News talent telling Donald Trump that he’s wrong and must never say anything like that again about a FOX News host. And then, on top of that, Mr. Ailes himself also personally put out what I think is an unprecedented statement and he not only put it out in writing. They read it on live TV. And through all of the years that I have spent goggling at FOX News as a political entity and being amazed by the things they will do, I have never seen them do something quite like this.
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MADDOW: Sometimes the universe delivers poetic justice. On the one hand, this does feel sort of like Godzilla versus Mothra, right? I mean, Republican news network versus frontrunner Republican presidential candidate. Two monsters of roughly the same size. How can a fight between them possibly end?
On the other hand, if you want a more monster specific -- a more specific monster metaphor that’s maybe more accurate, it may be less Godzilla and Mothra and more like Frankenstein and his own monster, because when Donald Trump wanted to become a real candidate and not a celebrity, when he wanted to start being treated like a candidate, FOX News did that for him. They created this thing, which they are now fighting.
And the fight is happening on the exact terms that FOX News itself invented. Ignoring the substance totally and fighting on the basis of “my ratings are bigger, my poll numbers are bigger, therefore I can’t hear you and I don’t have to hear you.” That’s been pure FOX News for years now. And now, it is pure Donald Trump and it is the way that he’s at war with FOX News. The universe is a snake that eats its own tail.
In an era where FOX News is dominant as Republican television, can a Republican candidate for president win without them? Or more to the point, can a Republican candidate for president win while being against them? My personal sense is no. My personal sense is that FOX News will endure no matter who the Republican nominee is and there can be no Republican presidential nominee without FOX News championing them.
But that’s my personal take. I mean, if it’s true, then this has to end somewhere different than it is right now. If the Republican frontrunner and FOX are at war, then that person cannot be the Republican frontrunner anymore. FOX must win. I know it has to end that way someday. But I do not know how we get there. Rarwr.
