Trump’s favourite show enjoys its day in sun
NEW YORK — Fox & Friends has emerged as the morning television show of choice for President Donald Trump and his fans, although that may have backfired for Fox News Channel this week.
Like many cable news shows in the Trump era, Fox & Friends has seen ratings jump, and not just in the White House. Its average February audience of 1.72 million viewers was 49 per cent over last year’s, the Nielsen company said. The show usually has more viewers than MSNBC’s Morning Joe and CNN’s New Day combined.
Trump’s Twitter feed provides ample evidence of his devotion, too.
Like Morning Joe, the political talk show whose love-hate relationship with Trump is clearly set on hate right now, Fox & Friends makes no secret of its opinions. Yet the episode with Fox senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano illustrated how news and opinion aren’t always a smooth mix.
Napolitano used Fox & Friends as a venue for his discredited report that British authorities helped former President Barack Obama spy on Trump. The White House cited the report to buttress its view that Trump’s predecessor was surreptitiously watching him, but after Britain dismissed it as “nonsense” and Fox said it could provide no evidence to back it up, Napolitano has been taken off the air indefinitely.
Fox & Friends was a frequent punching bag for Jon Stewart on The Daily Show and one media critic, Erik Wemple of The Washington Post, called it “easily the worst in all of televised news” following the Napolitano episode.
Watching it, though, the show appears to capture a sense of discontent and patriotism that appeals to many Trump voters, certainly in a way that mainstream journalists, to a large degree, have been unable to grasp. Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, said he suspects many people “enjoy watching it for the thrill of outrage.”
One day last week, the show had segments on “PC police” who were doing away with the designation of homecoming king and queen at a college, a man whose fiancée was killed by a drunk driver who was an illegal immigrant, a congressman who received bureaucratic resistance when he tried to hang a portrait of Trump in a veterans’ hospital and “chaos” on college campuses when conservatives are invited to speak.
Alex French, a 32-year-old working in sales in Charlotte, North Carolina, said he appreciated the show’s reporting on veterans and appreciates its interest in news away from the nation’s coasts.
“They do a good job of trying to reach out to people in the small towns,” he said.
Trump, who has declared ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC “the enemy of the American people,” told the three Fox & Friends hosts that “you have treated me very fairly” during an interview on Feb. 28. He did a weekly call-in to the show when he was campaigning for president.