Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
As the fallout from Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer crested with the revelation that there were more people in the room than previously disclosed, two very different narratives were playing out on the president’s favorite news source.
On Friday morning, Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy posited that “the Russia story is starting to fall apart.” Later that afternoon, Shepard Smith, speaking to Chris Wallace, took a baseball bat to that approach:
“If there’s nothing there, and that’s what they tell us, they tell us there’s nothing to this and nothing came of it, there’s a nothingburger, it wasn’t even memorable, didn’t write it down, didn’t tell you about it, ‘cause it wasn’t anything so I didn’t even remember it, with a Russian interpreter in the room at Trump Tower. If all of that, why all these lies? Why is it lie after lie after lie? If you clean, come on clean, you know? My grandmother used to say ‘when first we practice to…Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.’ The deception, Chris, is mind-boggling. And there are still people who are out there who believe we’re making it up. And one day they’re gonna realize we’re not and look around and go: Where are we, and why are we getting told all these lies?”
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake called it “a Walter Cronkite moment.” When the story of the Trump administration’s war with the media is written, it’s unlikely that Smith’s tirade with be credited, even apocryphally, with bringing about its end, but his exasperation—no little bit of it directed toward water carriers at his own network like Doocy, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson—highlighted a stark divide at a network that has largely afforded the president a soft landing.
Concerns about the sometimes blurred boundary between news and opinion at Fox are nothing new. Straight news from Smith, Wallace, Bret Baier, and contributors like Catherine Herridge and Jennifer Griffin often contradict the GOP cheerleading led by Hannity, Carlson, and others. The Trump-friendly opinionators rake in big ratings by occupying the prime real estate of the evening hours, but a forceful stand by those on the news side is a welcomed development.
No outlet has a bigger footprint among Republican voters. A Pew study found that 40 percent of Americans who said they voted for Trump relied on Fox News as their main source of information during the campaign. If Smith and the other journalists at Fox are more vocal in their support of serious reporting, they deserve our support in turn.
Below, more on the divide at Fox.
- The far-right beachhead on Fox: The New York Times’s Joshua Green explores “the world that Breitbart made.” Green writes that views once confined to the fringes of internet conspiracy sites and Limbaugh-esque talk radio have found their way to the mainstream.
- No defense: Writing in The Washington Post, Fox contributor Charles Krauthammer criticizes those in the media trying to defend the White House after the Donald Jr. news. “The evidence is now shown,” he writes. “This is not hearsay, not fake news, not unsourced leaks.”
- Fair and balanced?: com’s Rob Tornoe traces the whiplash-inducing swings in Fox’s coverage of the meeting between Don Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Other notable stories
- Several press freedom organizations have seen a swell of financial support in the months since Trump took office. CJR’s Jonathan Peters looks at 10 First Amendment and media law groups that have been overlooked, but are doing valuable work.
- The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan says that despite Donald Trump Jr. confirming reporting on his 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, the “fake news” claims of Trump supporters aren’t going away.
- Early Sunday morning, NPR reached an agreement with the union representing more than half of its employees, averting a worker walkout. CNN’s Jackie Wattles has the story.
- Missed this last week, but the story of how a high school newspaper in Washington state scored an interview with Defense Secretary James Mattis is a good one.
- Not all Republicans are on board with Trump’s media-bashing strategy. BuzzFeed’s Alexis Levinson talks with several GOP lawmakers who are “openly supportive of the free American press.”
- Baltimore Sun media reporter David Zurawik says the political commentary from Sinclair’s Boris Epshteyn “has come as close to classic propaganda as anything I have seen in broadcast television in the last 30 years.”
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
