October 15, 2019

MY CORNER  by Boyd Cathey

FOX NEWS, Fake Polls, and the Slide to the Left

Friends,

Here’s a question for you: what is the difference between “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace” and Mainstream Media’s “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press.” Answer: not much. All three programs basically parrot and convey the same thing, the same narrative, the same message to viewers. It is the viewpoint of the DC Inside-the-Beltway Swamp. And Wallace is especially notorious in this charade.

Case in point: this past Sunday, October 13, when Wallace hosted a panel consisting of Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal, Guy Benson of the “Benson-Harf” podcast, Charles Laine of The Washington Post, and Democratic strategist Donna Brazile. Supposedly Riley and Benson represented the “conservative” point of view, but in fact, they offered the same warmed over Neoconservative hysteria about withdrawing from Syria and “leaving our Kurdish allies in the lurch,” and their disaccord with “outsider” President Trump.

Switching over to NBC and CBS I heard and saw nothing that different, nothing that did not get said in nearly the same way by Wallace’s panel. That is, there was not one member of his four member panel who offered a defense of the president, not in the slightest. What we beheld were representatives of the Deep State “Swamp,” ranging from the progressivist Left (Laine and Brazile) to the Neocon pseudo-Right (Riley and Benson), joined together at the hip, defending vigorously the globalist foreign policy template, decrying ferociously President Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from the Syrian hotspot, and generally offering unanswered criticism of the president.

Curiously, Wallace had previously interviewed—grilled antagonistically is a better description—Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and his questions and stance towards Esper indicated without the slightest doubt that he partakes of the same narrative, the same anti-Trump narrative as the Leftist pundits occupying similar positions at CBS and NBC.

Even The New York Times—not a news source favorable to Fox— underscored this increasing anti-Trump tendency at the network. On Sunday [October 13], it reported that “Chris Wallace and Martha MacCallum criticized and mocked Trump during a closed-door meeting last month.  Fox News hosts Bret Baier, Chris Wallace, and Martha MacCallum attended an event in Manhattan to assure advertisers that ‘Trump doesn’t own’ them.”

The Times report, citing Wallace, went on:

“Mr. Wallace joked about the president’s tendency to compare him unfavorably to his father, the ’60 Minutes’ legend Mike Wallace, who died in 2012. ‘He often likes to say about me, ‘You know, I was covered by Mike Wallace, I liked him much more,’ Mr. Wallace told the advertisers. ‘To which my reaction is always: One of us has a daddy problem, and it’s not me.'”

And Wallace and since then other Fox pundits have repeated the recent Fox News Poll about impeachment, declaring solemnly that now 51% of Americans favor impeaching and removing President Trump. That poll is, to put it mildly, fake; it oversamples Democrats by 17%. Of course, the Fox News Poll got the 2016 election wrong as well, actually reporting that Hilary Clinton was widening a 4-point margin just one day prior to the vote.

According to The New York Post:

“The poll said 51% of voters were in favor of Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, while 40% did not want him impeached. Princeton, New Jersey, pollster Braun Research, which conducted the survey, noted 48% of its respondents were Democrats. But the actual breakdown of party affiliation [of the sample] is 31% Democrat, 29% Republican and 38% independent, according to Gallup. The poll prompted Trump to tweet: ‘Whoever [Fox News’] Pollster is, they suck’. A poll weighted for party affiliation would have concluded that 44.9% favored impeachment and 44.4% opposed it…

Quite a significant difference…and even those results are dubious and may be questioned on a number of levels.

The Post’s reporting appeared on Saturday, October 12, but Wallace and the Fox pundits continued to use the faked figures in their commentaries on Sunday. Trump responded by saying that Fox is “much different than it used to be in the good old days.”

I have been critical of Fox News before. On June 21, in a defense of Tucker Carlson (whose program, along with Lou Dobbs commentary, is one of the few I still view on Fox), I criticized the network:

“Consider the number of pundits who are involved in same sex unions who now appear regularly on the network and Fox’s apparent de facto acceptance of that assault on an essential belief of Western civilization. Or, consider Fox’s canonization of race hustler Martin Luther King Jr. and the disastrous civil rights revolution, and its eagerness to attack older traditions and figures of conservatism, in particular, of the Confederacy, as ‘racists,’ ‘segregationists,’ and ‘reactionaries.’ (Remember Fox host Brian Kilmeade’s series on the ‘Civil War’ which could have been—and maybe was—taken right out of Marxist historian Eric Foner’s textbooks?) Or, consider the network’s nearly complete support for globalism and employing American arms (and the lives of American boys) to impose ‘democracy’ (and thus current ‘American values’) on every poor, benighted desert oasis or impenetrable jungle in every God-forsaken corner of the world. I would argue strenuously that this internationalism is, both historically and philosophically, a leftist position and that it stands in direct opposition to traditional American conservatism.” [MY CORNER, “Is Fox News Really Conservative?”]

And before that, on August 20, 2019, I cited reporting in the morning “Fox & Friends” program during which the Fox announcers harshly condemned the Palestinian Authority for “banning an LGBT march” on the West Bank of Palestine. You see, those nasty Palestinians, according to Brian Kilmeade and Ansley Earhardt, were “violating the human rights” of those demonstrators.  

“As Kilmeade and Earhardt thundered, the ‘human right’ to free expression, to marry whomever you please (or just shack up, if that greases your wheels), to instruct our kiddies in all the finer aspects of same sex marriage, transgenderism, and other new ‘normative’ standards that our Fox newsies now accept, if not always explicitly, at the very least implicitly—all were being violated!” [MY CORNER, “Time to Cut Off Fox News?”]

Now, I can think of various other, serious reasons to criticize the Palestinians, but to offer as the “coup de grace” argument that they won’t let homosexuals enjoy “full equal rights” to marry and alter their natural gender, once again indicates the direction the network seems to be moving.

In April 2017 the Supreme Court’s issued its very controversial Obergefell v. Hodges decision, inserting arbitrarily into the Constitution against all precedent, the “right to same sex marriage.”

In my August 20 column I commented:

“And what has happened since then (and even before then)? Following the now-established legal template, Fox News and much, if not most of the Establishment Conservative Movement, Inc. has simply caved, accepted and gone along with that decision, and same sex marriage (and, yes, transgenderism) has become for the ‘movement’ more or less normative….”

There is another indication of this growing direction at Fox.  In March 2019 former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan joined the board of directors of the Fox Corporation and the Fox News Channel. And Ryan has been a reliable pillar of the Deep State establishment.

Appearing with Judge Jeanine Pirro, Saturday night, October 12, President Trump ripped Ryan, asserting that “for months…Ryan would not allow Republican House members to subpoena deep state criminals in the FBI and Justice Department. For two years of the Trump administration Paul Ryan allowed the deep state to launch attack after attack on this president while he remained silent.”

Certainly, there continue to be some useful items aired on Fox News. Pundits Carlson and Dobbs, much of the time, offer substantial and substantiated commentary; but the news division is headed Left and increasingly off the rails. And even the punditry—think here of Bret Baier’s nightly “Special Report”—reads like a “Who’s Who” of Never Trumpism, with Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, Ben Shapiro, Guy Benson, and others as leading personalities. And that standard is growing…and is a Trojan Horse which implicitly undermines the “Make America” Great agenda.