Apparently Fox News thought that Donald Trump claiming that a couple of its staffers wrote some jokes for him was no laughing matter.
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Fox News, which has been shilling for Donald Trump for years, essentially called the former president a liar on Friday.
Trump was appearing on the propaganda network’s morning show “Fox & Friends” when one of the hosts, Steve Doocy, asked the former president who had helped him write the jokes for his appearance at the Al Smith dinner the previous night.
“I had a lot of people, a couple people from Fox actually, I shouldn’t say that. But they wrote some jokes,” Trump said. “For the most part I didn’t like any of them.”
Even though everybody knows that Fox News is essentially a part of the Trump campaign, notwithstanding the recent lamentations of the former president, the network tried to do some damage control.
Apparently, Fox does not want its viewers to realize the obvious… which seems ridiculous in light of this week’s partisan display (and the past 25 years).
First, the network hosted a women’s town hall for the former president in which the audience was stacked with Trump supporters.
Then, “news” anchor Bret Baier played an edited clip during an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris that distorted whom Trump considers to be “the enemy from within.” Afterwards, Baier admitted that he made a “mistake.”
However, it seems as though having Fox staff write jokes for Trump, which would be wholly unsurprising (apart from the fact that the former president’s speech was pretty funny while Fox’s comedic hosts are not), was a bridge too far.
Therefore, a spokesperson told CNN that “Fox News confirmed that no employee or freelancer wrote the jokes.”
First of all, it’s amazing that the right-wing outlet managed to quiz all of its employees and freelancers so quickly. Kudos!
Apparently, none of them were on vacation, on planes, sleeping, sick, or otherwise indisposed.
And then, of course, that statement also means that Fox is saying that Trump lied Friday morning.
To people following the former president at all, that’s hardly a surprise. He lies all the time.
However, that may be news to the network’s viewers. After all, Fox’s entire business model is to present conservatives with an alternate reality more palatable for them… all while their audience believes that they are getting an accurate portrayal of what is going on in the world.
And, ultimately, that is probably what this is about.
Perhaps, by fact-checking Trump even once, Fox hopes that it can maintain the illusion of being a fair arbiter of news… and not the propaganda force that dictates what Republican voters see and believe.
Now that’s a good one!
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often funny analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
