The Daily Beast website posted a curious piece titled "Fox News Loves Trump. Dems Want to Complicate That Marriage." Gideon Resnick and Maxwell Tani suggested Democrats are discussing doing more outreach to conservative media outlets as the 2020 campaign gets under way. Their primary spokesman for the notion that Democrats should engage with Fox News was California congressman Eric Swalwell:
The congressman has made a personal effort to do more conservative media and is hoping others in his party will do the same; not just so that Trump can recognize them before White House meet-and-greets, but so that an audience that is intrinsically hostile to Democrats gets a more rounded picture of the party. It’s not an approach without risks. In Swalwell’s case, death threats have followed some of his appearances. But the congressman, who said he has been doing Fox News hits since getting invited on Sean Hannity’s show in his first weeks as a member of Congress, sees it as a net-plus.
“I think you have to go into that arena absolutely,” Swalwell advised. “You’re not going to win all of them but you can win enough of them. That’s how I see it.”
Some Democrats "have tried to chip away" at Trump's dominance of conservative media, "But the results have been mixed at best." Resnick and Tani cited defeated Sen. Claire McCaskill and re-elected Sen. Joe Manchin as a sample of the mixture. Of course, Fox-bashing is the dominant Democrat response:
“I think Democrats confuse the need to communicate to some voters that watch Fox with communicating to them through Fox,” Dan Pfeiffer, former senior adviser to President Obama told The Daily Beast. “You might as well participate in a RNC livestream for all the good it will do you. Even if the individual Fox interviewer does the unexpected and is fair, the rest of the network and the social-media side will use the interview to hurt you politically because that is their job. Most Fox viewers are a lost cause to Democrats but there are a portion of voters who are available to us and we need to try to reach them by going around, not through Fox....”
“Fox has always been bad, but they were a useful platform at times in 2008,” Pfeiffer said. “It got much worse after Obama won and they found out they could get great ratings by trying to scare white people 24/7 and have now stumbled into racist Pravda territory in the Trump years.”
Tracy Sefl, a veteran Democratic strategist, was given the job of establishing a relationship with the Drudge Report during Hillary’s initial run for the White House in 2008. She tells Democrats “Remember, this country is far, far bigger than the Acela corridor...and always respect the audience—if you can’t, you likely shouldn’t be on.”
PS: Daily Beast media writer Lloyd Grove wrote a nasty piece titled "Glenn Beck Gets Bailed Out by Right-Wing Nutjob Mark Levin." Grove called Levin "rabidly pro-Trump" and used the usual disgruntled Anonymous Source:
“We always thought Glenn was opposed to bailouts,” a former Beck employee told The Daily Beast on Monday—a reference to Beck’s bitter hostility to the federal government’s loans to stressed financial institutions and troubled automakers in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008-2009.
The ex-employee added acidly: “The only person who could possibly be rescued by Mark Levin is Glenn Beck."
