Erik Wemple, the media critic for The Washington Post criticizes the hosts of Fox & Friends for their obsequious response to the announcement by White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham that she is unlikely to revive the White House Press Briefing:
In a chat on Monday morning’s edition of “Fox & Friends,” Grisham was talking about how the White House handles questions from reporters. The last official White House press briefing happened in March, under previous press secretary Sarah Sanders. When will the next one be? “Ultimately if the president decides it’s something we should do, we can do that but right now he’s doing just fine,” said Grisham, who’d noted the president’s frequent availability for Q&A sessions. “And to be honest, the briefings have become a lot of theater and I think that a lot of reporters were doing it to, uh –“
“Get famous,” Kilmeade interjected.
“Get famous, yeah,” responded Grisham. “They’re writing books now. They’re all getting famous off of this presidency and I think it’s great what we’re doing now.”
God forbid that journalists might write books.
(…)
So driven is the “Fox & Friends” team by boot-licking imperatives that they apparently don’t bother to pause and consider: Hey, Fox News has a correspondent who hangs out at the White House and who benefited from press briefings when they used to happen. And despite all the baloney you heard in the Grisham segment, there’s one big reason the press briefings have died: There’s just no way to defend lies and incompetence on the scale that President Trump generates each day. The job is undoable, as both Spicer and Sanders proved every time that they approached the podium. Sanders bailed out not long after the Mueller report revealed that she had lied to reporters in May 2017 when she asserted implausibly that she’d received supportive comments from FBI officials following Trump’s firing of then-FBI Director James Comey.
Instead people like Sanders and Grisham have flocked to places like “Fox & Friends,” where there is no such thing as fact-checking.
On some level, of course, one wonders why Wemple is even bringing this up at this point. With the possible exception of the few professional journalists that work at the network, such as Chris Wallace, Bret Bair, Shephard Smith, and the team of White House Correspondents led by Ed Henry, who used to work the same beat for CBS News, basically the entirety of Fox News Channel has turned into a propaganda network for the Republican Party generally and President Trump specifically. This is especially true of the evening lineup of opinion-based programming consisting of Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity, of course, but it also applies to the vast majority of the so-called “news” programming at the network.
This is especially true of Fox and Friends, the network’s morning show that basically purports to replicate the atmosphere of the morning shows on the broadcast network. In reality, the show is just a soft news version of the network’s regular diet of pro-Administration propaganda that has also served as the source for some of the more bizarre tweets that you see from the President during the course of an average morning (although it is often evident that Trump is hate-watching Morning Joe on MSNBC or New Day on CNN.) It’s also worth noting that before he became a Presidential candidate Trump was a regular guest on the program, generally appearing weekly on Friday’s where the shows three hosts poured obsequious compliments all over him while he opined on the news of the day and, of course, attacked President Obama. He also used these appearances to spread his birther lies when that was a big part of his rhetoric back in 2011 and 2012. Given that, it isn’t all that surprising that the show is now basically a friendly confine where his Press Secretary and other members of his Administration can appear without having to worry about facing serious questions.
In other words, Fox News in general, and Fox and Friends specifically, has sold its soul to the President. Wemple’s criticism is well-founded, but what he focuses on has been so long-standing from that network that what we see now should not be surprising.
