By Staff Writer James Mellen II.
In an interview with the Huffington Post, Bernie Sanders responded affirmatively when asked if Fox News is a propaganda arm for the Trump administration. Duh.
This became a completely inarguable point when Trump shut down the government because Ann Coulter called him weak for not building the wall. However, the news outlet wasn’t always such a caricature of the GOP.
Before Donald Trump, the network thought that the camp of people who believed that Obama was born outside of the United States or “Birthers” were crazy conspiracy theorists, but after the shift in the White House, popular pundit Hannity said that he thought the circumstances of Obama’s birth were “odd.”
This isn’t to say that all of sudden Fox started to have crazy takes after Trump got elected; for instance one of their less popular takes was “pepper spray is good on the border,” whereas before Trump, Fox had takes a little more along the lines of “Waterboarding is good if it’s done on terrorists”.
So Fox has always had bad takes, but when Trump entered office the news source had to decide between maintaining the traditional crazy of Ronald Reagan supply-side economics, or move to a new type of Donald Trump crazy.
In 2016 popular conservative and former Fox news pundit Glenn Beck controversially opposed the election of Donald Trump, then at the end of 2016 when Trump got elected, Beck fell off the face of the earth. Then we come to late 2019, when Beck’s decided to start saying that if Trump doesn’t win in 2020 the American empire would crumble.
Beck had to do this. The type of positions that conservatives used to be able to take were completely outdated. In 2012, when Obama supported the DREAM Act, all you had to do to be a conservative was be against immigrants. But in 2018, when Trump separates children from their parents, conservative outlets are forced to support this type of policy if they want to maintain the current GOP establishment.
This isn’t just true of the news media by the way. Mitch Mcconnell voted against the government shutdown at first, but after Trump pushed for it so aggressively he ended up strongarming the Senate into shutting down the government.
Trump has completely changed the Overton Window in such a way that news is just broken, and not just with conservatives.
The most popular story amongst establishment liberal news sources has been “Russian collusion”, something that from the beginning has had little to no evidence to support, which America learned last week probably never happened.
Yet it’s been a news story that’s completely impossible to ignore if you’re on the middle left side of American politics. From The Washington Post to Pod Save America every liberal pundit has been saying “Russia Russia Russia” for the better part of a year now.
If the right side of American journalism has been broken by trying to force Trump’s actions into their ideology, the left half has been completely broken by trying to make sense of it all.
The liberal news media has seemingly been terrified of admitting that at his core Donald Trump isn’t that different than every president of the past 40 years; he’s rich, powerful, hard on immigration and crime, and he’s going to give huge tax breaks to the rich.
Any genuinely progressive news outlet would be more than willing to point out the similarities between Trump and one of the George Bushes, or even Trump and Bill Clinton.
But the DNC is terrified to push left; the American public saw this when superdelegates decided the race between Bernie and Hillary, and we’ve been seeing this since Trump got elected when the establishment left media has pushed narratives like “Trump colluded with Russia” instead of narratives like “Trump upholds the American establishment of the last 40 years by separating children from their parent at the U.S Mexico border.”