The Guardian
As the White House changes hands, so will Fox News’s support for the presidency.
After four years slavishly promoting the president and the White House, the right-wing media will make an abrupt turnaround. When Joe Biden takes office as president on January 20, viewers will be able to witness one of the most dramatic 180-degree turns in history. Four years slavishly promoting the president, Fox News is expected to hit the brakes seconds after the inauguration ceremony. Suddenly, the person in the White House is not a Republican. More than that, the network can no longer count on the willingness of the president or his aides to call Fox News at any time of the day or night. The right-wing TV channel and its great hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity will spend the next four years as the opposition party. The network has done this before, of course – the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency were not long ago – but Biden presents a different challenge. “Of course we can expect it to be relentlessly negative, but it is challenging on some levels, because he is a 78-year-old white man, with a fairly moderate history,” said Heather Hendershot, a professor of cinema and media at MIT who studies conservative media and from right. ” In the past, they attacked Hillary Clinton very strongly, not only because she was liberal, but there was obviously some underlying sexism and misogyny – and obviously the fact that Barack Obama was African American was central to the right’s attacks on him, implicit or explicitly, including on Fox News. This does not mean that the Biden government will want to escape an attack, even if it evades the worst. Kamala Harris will be the first black vice president and could become a target for Fox News presenters. If Democrats win two Senate runoff elections in Georgia, the Senate will be divided into 50-50 and Harris will have the casting vote. “[If that happens] it will be there in the front and center as a tiebreaker in Congress repeatedly, “said Hendershot.” And every time it happens, it’s a way to attack Biden tangentially – it gives [Fox News and other rightwing outlets] a kind of ‘red meat’ to attack Kamala Harris, because she is a woman and a person of color. ”Biden says he named“ the most diverse cabinet anyone has ever announced in American history ”, with Janet Yellen set to be the first woman to be secretary of the Treasury, while Lloyd Austin, if confirmed, would become the first black secretary of defense. . Pete Buttigieg, an occasional guest on Fox News, is set to be the first openly gay cabinet secretary as head of transportation. Fox News is already targeting another diverse group of Democrats: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and other non-white women in Congress. Mathew Gertz, a senior member of Media Matters for America, a media watchdog, said this is a topic he has continued to dominate, even since Biden became president-elect. “A lot of what we’re seeing now is less of a focus on Joe Biden himself and more of that idea that he’s going to be somehow a puppet for other figures that they find easier to attack – to sharpen her who’s Kamala Harris, or Bernie Sanders, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “said Gertz.” This is an angle that they pursued a lot during the campaign, and it’s something that they focused on during the transition as well. “The news was credited with helping to boost the growth of the Tea Party movement in 2010, which was the initial vehicle for marginal right-wingers to gain greater influence in the Republican Party. The attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in 2012 has become an old one on Fox News, even when the government was cleared – by a House committee controlled by Republicans – of any offense. “We have seen to some extent how this will unfold. Looking back to 2009, 2010, the early years of the Obama administration presented a lot of incredibly overheated and conspiratorial Fox News comments. I think it’s likely to be an area they’ll be happy to return to, ”said Gertz.“ It will probably be a source for the scandal we saw during the Obama administration – basically a return to coverage in Benghazi, where the network takes a news event and spends months and months and years and years studying it and telling its audience that it manages it Democratic education is the source of terrible actions. ”Obviously, the shift from supporting a president to opposing others is not without precedent. Liberal cable news networks will have experienced something similar when Trump was elected in 2016 – although CNN and MSNBC have never been the same quasi-propaganda clothes for Obama that Fox News has been for Trump. Still, more liberal news organizations experienced an increase in popularity, and an increase in the visualization of numbers, after Trump’s victory. MSNBC and CNN saw double-digit growth in views after Trump’s victory, while Atlantic, New Yorker and ProPublica saw an increase. n readers. Fox News declined to comment, but a spokeswoman pointed to Nielsen’s ratings showing that the network is consistently the most watched cable news channel. Casa, Lar. “Politicized media, whether reviewed or opinion, minors like [left-leaning] Nation or the [conservative] National Review, or bigger like Fox News, they tend to thrive financially the more oppositionists are, “said Hendershot.” They will have to increase their opposition due to the fact that Biden is president – and at the same time they can have their cake and eat it too, in the sense that they don’t miss Trump as a story because he will continue to promote himself, inaccurately, like the real president in exile. “” So they can do really well financially and politically, because they can not only attack Biden, they can hit Kamala Harris very hard, and they can also continue to work on Trump’s story, trying to satisfy that base, because Trump will not go away ”.