Even if Fox News were merely a right-leaning media outlet rather than a propaganda organ for the Republican Party, it would be natural for it to focus less on stories that are unhelpful to the conservative cause than the other cable news organizations. I don’t see this as a problem, as long as it’s more about editorial choice and customer satisfaction than actively misinforming the audience. Of course, that’s not the case. It’s helpful to look at Washington Post reporter Philip Bump’s latest examination of how Fox News has covered Donald Trump’s legal woes because it demonstrates (with charts!) just how little exposure the network’s viewers are getting to these issues compared to CNN and MSNBC viewers.
With the exception of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Fox News has come pretty close to completely ignoring Trump’s legal peril. When it has briefly mentioned the rape charges he’s facing, or his indictment in Manhattan or his likely indictment in Fulton County, Georgia, it’s mainly been to downplay the legitimacy and seriousness of the plaintiff, prosecutors and charges. For Bump, a natural consequence is that even Republicans who do not intend to support Trump’s third presidential campaign do not tend to list his legal problems as their motivation.
If you ask Republican primary voters — as CBS News did — why they don’t plan to vote for Donald Trump, the most common reason is simply that they prefer other candidates. The next reason on the list for just over half of those who don’t plan to vote for him is that Trump is too “controversial.” In third place, at 50 percent: “how he deals with political opponents.”
It’s only when you get to the fourth-most cited reason, one chosen by about 2 in 5 Republicans who say they don’t plan to vote for Trump — in other words, a fraction of a fraction of the party — is the swarm of legal issues that surround the primary front-runner.
To an outside observer, this might be hard to fathom.
There are two elements to Trump’s legal exposure. First, most obviously, is what it says about his character and suitability for higher office. A normal person might be willing to hear E. Jean Carroll out and, if they find her rape allegations against Trump credible, conclude that he’s not the kind of person who should be the leader of the country. We’re talking about someone’s vote, not whether the evidence is sufficient to prove liability. If you doubt someone’s character, that’s enough to find a different candidate to support.
Second, though, is a practical consideration of whether a person so accused is likely to win. You don’t want to back a loser because that comes with consequences for the issues you care about.
On either score, Republican voters need to know as much as possible about the legal cases against Trump. Pretending they don’t exist is just a form of denial. Robotically dismissing the merits of the charges has no predictive value. Both approaches can lead to the misimpression about how strong Trump is as a candidate.
Now, it’s true that Fox News can instead play a role in minimizing the damage these legal problems will produce for Trump. They can convince a lot of people that the charges are partisan and lacking merit. They can prevent people from knowing about the seriousness of his peril. Maybe they can produce a juror who refuses to find him guilty even against strong evidence. But that’s really not the kind of thing a news organization should do. Even a partisan news organization should want informed partisans with respect to their internal decision-making processes because, otherwise, they’ll choose the wrong leaders.
Ironically, there’s a lot of evidence that the executives at Fox don’t want Trump to win the Republican nomination. They’re not helping him because they want to ease his path. They’re doing it to fend off right-wing competitors, and they’re doing it out of habit, and they’re doing it because they still would prefer Trump to another term for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
One way of looking at it is that Fox News wants to simultaneously mold and satisfy the appetites of conservative viewers, but they’re falling down on the job of molding opinion away from Trump. They don’t think they can pull it off without losing ratings, and ratings matter to them more than some overarching ideological goal.
The result is that they’re contributing to their own problem. They’re in the best position to convince Republican primary voters not to go for Trump, but they’re doing all they can to make Trump’s nomination more likely, and that’s not what they want.
One of the main reasons they don’t want it is because, unlike their audience which they refuse to inform, they understand that Trump is probably a fatally flawed candidate, and that he’s grossly unfit for office.
