CNN and MSNBC will form a tag team to try and take down Fox News Channel. On Friday night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow bizarrely claimed she wasn't into "cable news wars," and then devoted almost 17 minutes of her show to promoting Hoax, the new Fox-bashing book by CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter. She lovingly read long passages for more than nine minutes, and then after an ad break, interviewed Stelter for seven and a half minutes.
The passages chosen here highlight Stelter's thesis that Fox News gave Trump a "false sense of complacency" on the coronavirus that cost untold thousands of lives, and his usual thesis that Trump is "unwell" or mentally unfit for his office.
MADDOW: You detail a number of policy pronouncements by the president, actions by the president, wild accusations and provocations from the president that appear to have come directly from, in many cases, chyrons, the on-screen text put up by specific Fox programs. They -- you describe them as sort of a shadow cable news government that appears to select policies for him knowingly. They may have been shocked at the beginning how much influence they had, but they know they have it now. They're using it knowingly while privately maintaining, many of your sources to you, that they believe the president is unwell, is mentally not there and not capable of holding down the job.
That doesn't just feel dangerous. It feels like an incredibly salient political decision.
STELTER: It's nothing close to journalism, you know, and there are real journalists at Fox who are very uncomfortable with this, who are disturbed by this situation, but they don`t have the power. The primetime stars have the power. The Fox & Friends people in the morning have the power. They are the ones talking to Trump, and they are the ones turning around and telling their friends in Hannity's words, Trump is a run-on sentence, you know, in the words of an executive at Fox, he is not well.
You know, there are -- it's such a disconnect between the on-air rhetoric and off-air reality, and that is what`s propping up this presidency. It is hard to imagine the president at 40 percent approval were it not for these people on Fox who, I'm sorry Rachel, I don't like to talk this way, they`re lying about him every day. They are talking about a president that doesn't actually exist, someone who stopped the virus when it was coming in from China. We all know that's not true. But these talking points are repeated over and over again in a form of propaganda we've never had in this country before.
It's hilarious that Stelter claims "I don't like to talk this way," about Fox and Trump being a pile of liars. Stelter's full-time job seems to be ripping into Trump and Fox as insane and dangerous to America. So it should be obvious that any anonymous sources Stelter is quoting must share his agenda of destroying the network that trounces CNN routinely.
