Not an American here, but I’ve always found the idea of Americans basically being split 50-50 in terms of their perception of what’s going on in the world as a result of the media they’re consuming fascinating. If something is going on, CNN will show one perspective, while Fox News would show another. But you’d at least have two different perspectives.
But over this past week, something seems to have changed and gone a bit further. The top news on the Fox News website doesn’t even mention major things that have happened. The stock market had amongst its worst 2-day stretch ever, and there were massive protests across the US, and neither were even among the top 5 news stories on Fox News. It’s all about immigration – South Sudan visas being paused or an attorney in the DOJ being suspended, which relative to a the stock market losing trillions or people protesting in the millions seems like small fry stories to be honest.
I don’t understand how they’ve just stopped reporting by the news. They always just put their spin on it, no matter what it is. Even things like Jan 6. So why the shift?
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I mean Fox News doesn’t claim to be a news source they’re an entertainment network, the target audience won’t look at another source so they’re isolating bad and giving them something else to be mad about
Reddit is over exaggerating the stock market, it can go down much deeper then this
Fox News is pure propaganda for the Republican party.
Trump essentially has Fox News in his pocket. Anything that makes him look bad or does not perpetuate his narrative is not covered.
There is no good way to spin the stock market crashing or the nationwide protest in Trump’s favor, so they are simply not covering it.
It’s as simple as that.
They have an entire section/segment dedicated to Trump news. Mostly likely they just wanna separate that from everything else because if they didn’t then they would just be talking about trump all day long.
the rupert murdoch bullshit factory routinely defends against law suits by stating it is not an actual news outlet, that no reasonable person would conclude that it is, and thusly, they are under no obligation to be factual.
There are times when it’s hard to nullify the magnitude of numbers. It’s not a grey area of discussion. The most sympathetic to MAGA cause support the current policies by saying that’s it’s a temporary tumble and things will get better.
The idea is to have everything from raw materials to manufacturing in the US locally. Everything needs to be incentivised to be Made in America. Because America can produce each and everything and doesn’t need any other country. Just cut-paste US to Mars and we will all be liberated from the US of A.
Half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 (54%) read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
A lot of them are just plain and simple stupid.
Fox has deeply tied itself to Trump and his success. When he fails, they look bad for supporting him. He is failing now and they don’t want to look bad.
They could try putting a positive spin on the economic catastrophe unfolding in real time, but it’s probably too on the nose for their audience who will see the contradiction between their personal financial situation and the spin. For example, retirement investments have taken an absolute beating already, and fox’s largest demographic are older people. Telling them to chill while their financial future vanishes is unpalatable for a network whose bread and butter is pandering.
So instead they stay silent. Audience members who only get their news from fox can remain ignorant for as long as possible, and those who also get news elsewhere don’t have to watch fox admit they backed an incompetent (or just plain evil) horse.
Avoiding reality is their baseline. Lies are one way, wilful blindness is another. This is an attempt to foster the latter.
For a long time, even when American news conglomerates didn’t really want to report the news – i.e., it’s the kind of news where public awareness isn’t so good for the owners’ business interests – they were still kind of pushed into reporting it, by the prospect of competition. If the competing news service runs a story and they don’t, then viewers might change the channel. And that means lost ad revenue from lost viewers. And it means lost brand value too; it’s a bit embarrassing to be the last one covering a big hot story.
So, they’d report even when they kind of didn’t wanna. Maybe not enthusiastically, maybe not with a very honest spin; but if nothing else, they’d do it just so that no one could accuse them of not doing so. The threat of competing networks scooping stories from one another, helped to keep them honest. At least to an extent, anyway.
I don’t have data to support this and I’m just going by vibes here, but: I think that business logic, which prevailed for many decades, is starting to fall apart. The news-network viewers are a lot more entrenched in their partisan allegiances than 10 or 20 years ago. The risk of Fox News viewers switching to another, less-far-right, news station, are pretty low now that those viewers are so committed to distrusting the other sources as “woke”. The fear of embarrassment, just isn’t really there anymore.
tl;dr Now that they know they can get away with any omission, now that their audience is actively hostile to ‘fact checking’ as a whole concept… they no longer have any shame.
edit: Another reason, is probably simpler: direct partisan influence from the White House. I wouldn’t be surprised if some showrunners, hosts, etc. at the network are afraid of punishment if they break the silence.
Because thus is something liberals care about. We don’t. The market will be back up again, with our country in a much more advantageous position vis a vis our trading partners. Paid protests by crazy leftists over losing billions in stolen taxes are irrelevant.
That’s because Fox News is an entertainment channel.