Penn State professor and Bernie Sanders enthusiast Sophia McClennen has a message for her fellow progressives: “If the thought of a [Donald] Trump presidency worries you, the thought of a Trump news network should scare the hell out of you.”
McClennen’s Monday piece for Salon addressed reports that if Trump loses to Hillary Clinton, he, Steve Bannon, and Roger Ailes may start a competitor to Fox News. McClennen expects that a Trumpcentric media business would be “founded on the same principles we have seen in place during his campaign: hate mongering, extreme nationalism, xenophobia, misogyny and a total lack of connection to reality. If the campaign seemed to have fascist tendencies, imagine a news network founded on those same principles.”
McClennen considers the potential audience for Trump TV the dregs of humanity, and doesn’t think much more of Fox News and its viewers: “The network…churn[ed] out hate, lies and stupidity while suggesting that any alternative viewpoint and any correcting information was nothing more than a ‘politically correct’ attack…Because the draw was to appeal to viewers based on their beliefs and not their reason, the channel created a base of viewers that worshiped the network as if it were a religion more than a news station.”
Then, however, came signs (or at least rumors) that Fox was “moving away from the extremist right-wing views that were its trademark…That was the context within which Trump launched his campaign…The transition to a Fox News more dominated by [Megyn] Kelly-style reporting might have been seamless…but for Trump, whose campaign came in and revealed the deep friction between the Fox News founding values of hate, lies and spin and the newer vision.”
Trump, contended McClennen, “tapped into the ultraconservative base who had started to feel that Fox News was too supportive of the GOP establishment.” Even if he’s not the next POTUS, she warned that “if we take Trump’s blustering celebrity, Ailes[’s] cunning political strategy and Breitbart’s ultraconservative stance and combine them, we could have a news empire that will make the angry, fact-averse, polarizing reporting of Fox News look like the Disney Channel.”
