Fox News officially announced on Tuesday that it had hired former Trump spokesman Kayleigh McEnany as a contributor.
“It is a great pleasure today to welcome Kayleigh Mcenany into the Fox family,” said anchor Harris Faulkner on Tuesday morning after ending an air interview with former actor Trump. “We will see much more of it in the future.”
Fox News did not respond when asked to comment.
The addition of a well-known and frequent liar to the Fox News list has triggered some alarms in a newsroom that has been “purged” in recent months in favor of right-wing opinion programming and content aimed at keeping MAGA’s stubborn audience satisfied.
“It is really disgusting that they fired working journalists who were concerned with facts and reporting just to turn around and hire a mini-Goebbels whose incessant lies from the White House helped incite an uprising in our democracy that killed five people, including a policeman,” a Fox News source told The Daily Beast. “Post-Trump Fox is quickly becoming a very scary and very dangerous place for our democracy. It is no longer conservative news. They have plunged into an alternative reality where extremist propaganda is the only way on the menu. “
The official announcement came weeks after it was reported that McEnany was in talks to join Fox News immediately after leaving the Trump administration.
In his latest public financial disclosure report, filed in late January, McEnany claimed that he had signed an “employment contract with Fox News”. According to the network at the time, however, “there was an agreement being negotiated, but it was put on hold”, adding that they would be open to hiring it because Fox “does not tolerate the cancellation of the culture”.
“It’s disturbing,” a Fox News official lamented to The Daily Beast. “So many good people are unemployed now and I am sure she will get a big contract.” But hiring makes sense, said the official, because “Sarah Sanders just ran for governor of Arkansas and our audience loves Kayleigh.”
Another newsroom official said of McEnany’s hiring: “It bothers me because it’s basically a slap in the face for hardworking journalists who value real news and facts. But I am not surprised, either, because they have shown that they don’t give a damn about real facts and news. “
A third Fox News employee further protested the hiring, saying, “There is no more objectivity in this business. It is a profitable company that serves itself. McEnany clearly attracts Fox, said the employee, because of “name recognition, notoriety, an obvious willingness to say anything her employer wants. Viewers are idiots. “
McEnany has been a constant presence on Fox News. She started her media career working on Mike Huckabee’s Fox show and made regular appearances on nightly shows Red eye before becoming a fact-deficient pro-Trump analyst on CNN and eventually joining the White House team.
Immediately after Trump’s decisive electoral defeat for President Joe Biden, McEnany was an almost nighttime presence on presenter Sean Hannity’s prime time program, infamously waving reams of papers in an effort to promote the president’s “Big Lie” that the The election was “stolen” from him due to widespread electoral fraud that did not exist. She at one point, for example, said that Trump had only “one quadrillion chance” of losing to Biden, repeating a denied and utterly false argument from the legal team. ex-president.
The signing of the Trump flack comes amid Fox’s attempt to win back MAGA viewers, who left the network after Trump’s electoral defeat. After the network’s decision table made an early (and correct) projection of Election Night that Biden beat Arizona, disgruntled Trump fans switched the channel to other vehicles more devoted to Trump, such as Newsmax. (Fox’s ratings have rebounded somewhat in the past few weeks, with the network recently winning prime time.)
In the wake of difficult ratings, which saw the network finish third for the first time in 20 years, Fox revamped its daytime programming and expanded its right-wing opinion programming, adding new conservative opinion programs at 7 pm and 11 pm. The network also boosted its so-called “hard news” programs to focus more on its coverage in the comments of its prime-time opinion hosts and the topics of the day’s conservative cultural war.
“The channel is trying not to lose even more viewers,” noted one Fox News employee. “They are clinging to little things about how to keep the audience that they have built and fueled over the past four years or so with Trump at the forefront.
“It is about keeping viewers and they will do anything to do that, including lying unabashedly and selling their souls and integrity to the devil.”
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Diana Falzone was an on-camera and digital reporter for FoxNews.com from 2012 to 2018. In May 2017, she filed a lawsuit for gender discrimination and disability against the network and made a deal, leaving the company in March 2018. .