New ‘Hoax’ book examines Fox News-Trump embrace
First there were Showtime’s seven-part TV series, “The Loudest Voice in the Room” and the “Bombshell” movie, both focused on an anti-hero named Roger Ailes.
Now, Americans who are interested in the incestuous relationship of Fox News and Donald Trump can read a book called “Hoax” that details — through a huge number of interviews — a tangled but intriguing real life story.
Brian Stelter, show runner for the “Reliable Sources” broadcast at 8 a.m., Sundays on CNN, authored the non-fiction book after doing a large number of interviews.
I was critical of Stelter in an earlier column because he committed the error of many hosts who get in shouting matches with their interview subjects.
But the book is a tribute to thorough reporting of real life, hinged between presidential activities and a popular TV show, Fox News.
Ailes manufactured the Fox News show by providing right-wing material to a huge number of viewers.
David Enrich, a New York Times reviewer, wrote “A small sampling of Fox’s fictions: The ‘caravan’ of terrorists and criminals supposedly marching north to invade America. The debunked conspiracy theory that a Democratic National Committee staffer was murdered for leaking campaign emails. The false claim that Ukraine, not Russia, was interfering in the 2016 election. Most recently. The deadly notion that the Coronavirus was no worse than the seasonal flu.
“One moment those falsehoods were being served up by Fox personalities. The next, the president was parroting them, embellishing them, amplifying them to his tens of millions of social media followers — sometimes even plagiarizing Fox’s parodical chyrons.”
In his prologue, Stetler wrote “On March 26, 2020, the people of the United States desperately needed a leader. Instead they got Donald Trump and Sean Hannity.”
Ailes headed the news productions until he was let go because of numerous sexual provocations.
Stelter wrote Fox once had a journalistic culture. But money plays a major role in the relationship. Fox News makes nearly $2 billion a year.
It’s well-known that Fox News is the cheerleader in chief for a TV-obsessed president. Enrich wrote that “We know the channel traffics in misinformation.”
Eventually Trump and Sean Hannity, a top star in the Fox line-up, joined forces, with Hannity’s entwinement with the new president moving far beyond sycophantic interviews and concocted conspiracies.
Stetler once commented that a female anchor “knew how to use sex to get ahead.”
“The word ‘hoax’ was uttered more than nine hundred times on Fox News in the first six months of 2020,” Stetler wrote.
The book’s author concluded his work with some quips: “White House officials lied when they denied having used tear gas to clear a path through a non-threatening crowd in Lafayette Park for a presidential photo op. Trump lied about crowd size (again) when the streets swelled with peaceful protesters, whom he linked to ‘terrorists’ and ‘anarchists. Having no truth to tell the public, ever, he set the people against each other, stirring up strife.”