As News Corpse has been reporting for the past seven months, the media has been saturated with Donald Trump in his quest to be crowned King of America. It is a disgraceful display of journalistic malpractice that has provided a racist, neo-fascist demagogue (he doesn’t deny it) an unprecedented platform to compete for residency in what he and his followers wish was a truly “White” House. But as bad as the collective press has been, Fox News is far and away the worst of the lot.
Media Matters has been doing monthly analyses of the time distribution on Fox News for the Republican candidates. Every month has produced the same results with Trump far outpacing the rest of the field. At times Trump’s airtime on the network has exceeded ten of his rivals combined. And now, looking at the year-end summation from May to December, the dominance of Trump on Fox News is both astonishing and nauseating. Media Matters notes that…
“Trump’s 22 hours and 46 minutes of airtime was more than twice as much as any other candidate during the period studied. Trump racked up more airtime on the network than Sen. Ted Cruz, former Gov. Jeb Bush, and Sen. Marco Rubio combined.”
Calculating the frequency of Trump’s Fox News appearances reveals that he was on the network for an average of 11.5 minutes every other day for more than seven months. That comes to about 19.5% of the total time given to all sixteen of the GOP candidates. And note that this only represents the amount of time that Trump appeared on Fox. There was much more time spent talking about him, promoting him, and defending him, when he himself was not on the air.
Breaking it down by some of the top Fox programs is equally unfair and imbalanced. Of the amount of time devoted to candidates on Bill O’Reilly’s show, Trump received 37%. Likewise, he received 32% of the total candidate time on Sean Hannity’s show, 30% on Fox & Friends, and 22% on Greta Van Sustern’s show. The only other Fox primetime program is The Kelly File, where Trump appeared only 2% of the time due to his ongoing feud with Megyn Kelly. Is it any wonder that Trump is leading the Republican primary polls? How would the standings be different if Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio had received the amount of airtime that Fox gave to Trump?
Nevertheless, Trump relentlessly bitches about the allegedly unfair treatment he gets from Fox News. What more could he possibly want? And yet, despite the vastly preferential attention he gets, he is never satisfied. In September Trump declared that he had “decided that I won’t be doing any more Fox shows for the foreseeable future.” That was accompanied by retweets of his followers advocating a boycott of Fox. Like most of what Trump says, that obviously wasn’t true.
How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.
And it’s still going on. In a tweet today Trump whined that “@FoxNews treats me so badly.” That utterly delusional whimpering is typical of Crybaby Trump. I’m sure his opponents would love to be treated so badly. If Trump is so offended by Fox’s treatment of him, why doesn’t he just decline to appear on the network like he threatened to a couple of months ago? Well, because he knows that he’s lying and is feeding off of the constant attention he gets from Fox. Perhaps a better question is why does Fox continue to give Trump so much more attention when all he does is whine about it and insult their anchors and pundits? Certainly the ratings, and corresponding revenue, could have something to do with it. But no reputable news organization would subvert democracy so conspicuously for profit. And that’s the advantage that Fox News has: They don’t have to pretend that they’re reputable.
