Decoding Fox News

Months ago, I decided to go through all 117 Trump campaign rallies from 2023-2024. Each event is about 90 minutes long, so it’s been quite an undertaking. I’ve only gotten through 72.

I wanted to see patterns in how he spun his exaggerations and lies to send his followers down the MAGA rabbit hole. Although Trump is a natural salesman in many ways, he’s had so many business failures that it’s astounding that he was able to transfix about one-third of this country.

After failing to sell steaks, bottled water, vodka, supplements, mortgages, cologne, shuttle...

As Trump travels across the country to give speeches in mostly deeply red states his propaganda machine is running out of ideas.

The network has tried every way possible to lift the president’s sagging poll numbers and boost Republican candidates in the midterm elections.

It’s not working. Most polls continue to favor Democrats even in races that Republicans would have won easily four years ago.

Since there is no imposing migrant caravan headed towards the southern border Fox News had to get creative.

The network shifted its focus to Euro...

Last week Fox News continued to scramble to come up with content that would keep its viewers’ eyes on the screen while it avoided unpleasant news for Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party.

The latest jobs report was dismal, the president’s approval ratings hit a record low and polling for Republican candidates continued to drop.

The Network tried to distract its audience with segments about National Pumpkin Spice Day, Fat Bear Week, salacious criminal trials and the body cam footage from the arrest of Luigi Mangione.

Fox News hosts also made excu...

Normally at this point in an election year Fox News includes segments with photogenic and well-spoken voters who say glowing things about President Trump and the Republican Party.

Fox News normally loves to welcome a bunch of hand-selected folks from various backgrounds to sit in neat rows on the Fox & Friends set and share their thoughts about an upcoming election.

There’s always a couple of moderate Democrats thrown into the mix for good measure but never anyone who might cause an outburst or stage a protest in the middle of the segment.

Ev...

It’s getting more obvious by the day on Fox News that the MAGA dream is dying and the network has given up on trying to revive it.

For weeks the folks on the network have tried to send signals to Trump that voters weren’t happy with the war in Iran or the state of the economy.

It hasn’t worked. As Americans struggle to pay for gas and groceries their glorious leader threatens to destroy The Kennedy Center.

Trump’s disconnect with the public is profound. During rallies meant to boost struggli...

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Last week as the Republican Party held a 14-hour Midterm election extravaganza Fox News, the network most closely aligned with the president and the GOP, downplayed the event.

Instead of focusing its cameras on the speakers who appeared live onstage at the convention the network spent most of its airtime on a luxury box at the American Airlines Center. There in a makeshift television studio Fox News hosts, popular Republican lawmakers, podcasters and pundits discussed the midterm election.

For The Five, the network’s top-rated show, the corporate leadership at Fox chose to include only on...

Every now and then I see cracks in the matrix of the well-formed Fox News propaganda apparatus. President Trump’s many manic social media posts, the failing war in Iran and his rapidly sinking poll numbers are all taking their toll on the network.

Fox News hosts are tired of the nonstop chaos that is Trump 2.0.

Last week multiple Fox News hosts appeared to almost malfunction as they spoke openly and candidly about problems with Trump’s economic policies, the high price of gasoline and the prospect of major losses in the midterms.

They...

If desperation had a scent all of Midtown Manhattan would be overwhelmed from the stench generated by Fox News headquarters. What started out as a dream for the network on January 20, 2025, has turned into a nightmare of another never-ending war in the Middle East, high gas prices, a rise in the popularity of socialism, and a mentally declining president who is more focused on his vanity projects than his campaign promises.

Fox News was so panicked the network dedicated entire segments to Hasan Piker, a controversial leftwing Twitch streamer who is not well known outside of his...

Fox News took things to another level last week in the network’s attempts to avoid talking about Trump’s disastrous war in the Middle East, high gas prices, a sluggish economy and the president’s obsession with his gilded building projects.

The network spent over 1/3 of its airtime on the shows I covered last week trashing Democrats mostly Abdul El-Sayed and Angie Nixon.

Nixon is a talented and charismatic Florida state rep who easily won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. She is unapologetically loud and known for sharing her opinions on the House...

For weeks the folks at Fox kept telling their audience that diehard communist revolutionaries were on a mission to destroy the American way of life. The movement started in deep blue congressional districts in New York City but was quickly spreading across the nation to envelop the heartland.

Thanksgiving celebrations would be canceled; football games would be replaced by Pagan transgender drum circles and air conditioners would be confiscated by the state and smashed by blue-haired women studies majors.

On the night of Wisconsin’s primary when it became clear that the Democratic Socialist gubernatorial ca...

Last week Fox News attempted to revive long since dead horrors for its audience - the COVID-19 pandemic, outrage over a transgender athlete scandal that did NOT include a transgender athlete and commies, commies and more commies.

In late June the Supreme Court ruled that states were allowed to ban transgender athletes from K-12 and colligate sports programs for women and girls. This essentially barred transgender athletes from competing in women and girls’ sports in 29 states.

The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic committee announced last July that it would ban transgender women from competing. Several ot...

As the president’s ill-conceived conflict with Iran becomes more unstable and chaotic his personal propaganda machine has run out of ways to spin it to its viewers. Last week the network was more than happy to hype up a personal vendetta Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has against Dr. Anthony Fauci, formerly the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) cast himself as a noble physician battling what he believes is a corrupt mad scientist, Fauci, who was hellbent on accumulating power and wealth during one of the darkest ch...

Most of the folks at Fox News last week looked like they would rather endure a drug-free root canal performed by a trained chimpanzee than talk about Trump’s disastrous war in Iran. The conflict that was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks has dragged on for months with no real end in sight.

More American troops have paid the ultimate sacrifice as Iran managed to strike U.S. a military base in Jordan. As soon as the first retaliatory strike was launched at an Iranian target gas prices spiked.

As the mi...

Last week the folks at Fox News seemed like the frustrated parents of a juvenile delinquent son who was caught setting his high school principal’s car on fire.

The network had no problem spinning measles outbreaks, the Epstein files coverup, the murder of Iranian school children, the mass pardon of cop beaters, the president’s insider trading, self-dealing, foreign bribes, vanity projects, or his deference to Bibi Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin.

Fox News didn’t seem to care that he kept threatening the very foundations of our democracy with unconstitutional executive orders while openly defyin...

Last week on Fox News guests and hosts alike seemed to all come up with the exact same conspiracy theory about the Democratic Party and control of the U.S. Senate.

According to the Fox News narrative party leaders decided to pick a deeply flawed yet charismatic blue collar oyster farmer, Graham Platner, to run for the U.S. Senate in Maine. The second he started to dip in the polls the Democratic machine convinced one of his ex-girlfriends to tell the press that Graham sexually assaulted her.

When Platner dropped out of the race...

Last week Fox News hosts attempted to marry the glory of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States with the lurking danger of an impending domestic communist revolution.

Never mind that Americans are super shoppers in many ways as approx. 70% of the U.S. economy is based on consumer spending. The folks on Fox News think the largest free market economy in the world is about to collapse into a Soviet style managed economy.

The fear of communism is an evergreen topic on the Murdoch owned media empire but the recent primary...

When things aren’t going well for President Donald J. Trump Fox News has a few tools in its arsenal to keep its viewers terrified, paranoid and glued to their television sets. One of the network’s biggest propaganda weapons of mass distraction is the fear of a communist revolution in the United States.

So far this year the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) endorsed 150 candidates in primary elections for federal, state and local offices banking 38 wins. Last week in New York City nine of the ten candidates backed by the DSA won their races in deeply blue...

Trump’s proposed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the U.S. and Iran is so dreadful that even the network that helped get him elected cannot muster much enthusiasm for it.

The producers at Fox & Friends trotted out several experts who said the pending agreement was worse than no deal between the two countries. Brian Kilmeade even snapped an experienced military expert who tried to downplay the agreement’s shortcomings.

Sean Hannity shifted his focus to criticizing the newly opened Obama Presidential Center rather than try to promote the deeply flawed MoU. The cast of The...

The Fox News propaganda machine normally promotes the same triumphant rhetoric for its glorious leader. The network portrays President Donald J. Trump as a master negotiator, a maverick and an unconventional leader who is changing the world through his unique personality and force of will.

All of Trump’s flaws are excused as part of his genius. His many deficiencies are completely ignored. The network also pretends that he is incredibly popular with the American people.

Last week for a moment in time the network’s enthusiasm for Trump started to wane. Laura Ingraham couldn’t hold...

Last week the folks on Fox News promoted Republican candidates as if they were public relations specialists hired directly by their campaigns to create negative ads about their opponents. As we approach the midterm elections Fox News is ramping up its propaganda to aggressive and unapologetic Agitprop (Agitation and Propaganda Section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party) levels.

As they have done in past elections Fox tends to focus on candidates that will get the biggest emotional reaction from its viewers rather than focusing on tight races. The race for the U.S. Senate seat...

Last week the folks at Fox News put most of their focus on promoting Republican candidates across the country. The network didn’t praise GOP hopefuls as much as it trashed Democrats.

James Talarico, a U.S. Senate candidate in Texas, was presented as a politically radical girly soy boy who munched on vegan burgers and thought that God was transgender. Graham Platner, a U.S. Senate candidate in Maine, was a Nazi, communist and a trust fund brat all at once.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul was a radical socialist in close cahoots with th...

Fox News started last week predicting a massive U.S. military campaign that would crush Iran and end Trump’s gamble in the Middle East. Within 24 hours Trump declared another pause in the conflict which forced Fox News to pivot to more mundane topics.

By mid-week the war wasn’t even a major story. The network’s highest rated show The Five didn’t even include a single segment about the war for the entire week.

Fox News still hasn’t found its footing on how to sell or promote this deeply unpopular conflict in the Middle...

Anyone tuning into Fox News last week might think the channel had converted to a home shopping network that sold only one product - the glorious leader himself Donald J. Trump.

The president was treated like an overpriced trinket. “Look at how he stands next to Xi Jinping. Observe how his tiny makeup covered hands touch the Chinese leader’s! Such majesty!”

It wouldn’t have surprised me if Fox shifted to a sales pitch while discussing the president, “If you call right now, you too will get our exclusive offer and pay for your own Glorio...

Fox News continues to stumble and bluff its way through an incoherent sales pitch for Trump’s poorly planned war with Iran. Sean Hannity along with some of the last remaining neocons also promoted the worst idea in the world - sending weapons to the Iranian people.

It was 1979 again in the absolute worst way possible.

Normally the network forms a united front about any given topic, narrows in on its target and repeatedly pummels it. Fox News hosts will often use the exact same phrasing, slogans, catch phrases, and battle cries across multiple programs.

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Fox News started last week dutifully hyping up Trump’s proposed White House ballroom. On Monday on every show, I covered Trump’s favorite vanity project was championed as a life saving measure that would protect the president and top-ranking cabinet officials from the bullets of a would be assassin.

By Tuesday the network had moved on. Fox News executives are known for obsessively tracking audience reaction. I suspect that even the most diehard Fox News fans were just not that excited over an enormous columned building their glorious leader cannot stop talking about.

The netw...

At this point in the second Trump administration Fox News has become the parent of a spoiled child sitting in the principal’s office of an expensive private school insisting their kid did absolutely nothing wrong.

The defiant parent stares back in scorn at an underpaid and overworked school administrator explaining. while sipping instant Maxwell House from a Styrofoam cup, how little Donny set fire to another teacher’s desk then faked an asthma attack to get out of detention. At the emergency room he threatened to fight the triage nurse after she determined his breathing was perf...

Since President Trump decided to attack Iran Fox News has become a buffoonish propagandist for a half-baked military fiasco. Instead of acknowledging that the president is not a trustworthy source of information the network repeats his delusions as if they were Gospel truths.

As Trump manipulates the financial markets and lies about phantom agreements with the Iranian regime Fox News folds and twists itself into complex knots of fabricated nonsense to justify the incredibly unpopular conflict in the Middle East.

The man cost the network $787.5 million in a defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems after...

Last week Fox News returned to its schizophrenic confused coverage of the war in Iran. In the mornings on Fox & Friends the conflict was depicted as a chaotic mess between a stubborn Iranian regime that refused to give an inch and Trump the misunderstood magical deal maker. The morning crew promised its viewers that although the war was a fiasco military success and lower gas prices were just round the corner.

On Jesse Watters Primetime the Iranian regime was defeated and the war was already over. Trump had accomplished what no other American leader had done before...

Last week when Fox viewers turned on their favorite propaganda machine, they entered a magical world of delusion where Trump was still incredibly popular, the war in Iran was going smoothly and things looked rosy for Republicans in the midterm elections.

The network downplayed the massive ‘No Kings’ protests that were organized all over the country reducing the demonstrations to a bunch of old people who were paid agitators wasting their time.

Polls had no meaning on Fox. Even the network’s own Fox News poll showed Trump’s approval ratings plummeting on every aspect of his p...

Last week Fox News decided everything was more important than the war between Israel, the United States and Iran. Although the conflict was still the top topic for the week most of the segments dedicated to it included retired military leaders pontificating on possible next moves for the commander-in-chief.

While the PBS News Hour showed massive damage to residential buildings and energy infrastructure in Lebanon, Israel and other countries in the Middle East, Fox News featured war correspondents talking into cameras.

Anyone watching Fox News would have no idea that civilian targets in Israel, Iran...

Much like the seams in any suit jacket worn by the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth Fox News is barely keeping it together. The network still can’t get its message straight regarding Trump’s disastrous war in Iran.

Fox is following the lead of its glorious leader, a man who appeared to act impulsively, when he decided to attack a country of 92 million people with one of the largest militaries in the Middle East.

Trump is highly skilled at selling himself, at least to his cultish base of followers, as a powerful leader who can...

Fox News twisted itself into knots to convince its audience that a misguided and poorly planned war in the Middle East was a brilliant idea after its glorious leader promised - no new wars.

To accomplish the impossible the network’s hosts weaved intricate tapestries of lies filled with invented histories of domestic oil production, gas prices, Trump’s previous attacks on Iran, fairy tales of enriched uranium and a revolution that could start at any moment.

Less than a year ago Fox News celebrated the success of Operation Midnight Hammer a military strike that was...

Last week on Fox overpaid television personalities tried to fake their way through a war they didn’t understand. As the president changed the reasons he started the military conflict with Iran the folks at Fox struggled to forge a coherent message about it.

The propaganda machine sputtered and stumbled. The network kept repeating Trump’s mixed messages:

* The war was already over/The war will be over soon/This isn’t a war

* High gas prices are a small price to pay for freedom/Gas prices will drop immediately/Americans don’t care abo...

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Last week Fox News tried to do three things - venerate the president, trash Democrats and convince its viewers that the Epstein files were somehow all about the network’s favorite arch nemesis Hillary Clinton. By the end of the week Fox got slammed by a news story it couldn’t ignore - the U.S. military attack on Iran.

Before Donald J. Trump made the wildly risky move to attack Iran he had hit a bit of a rough patch. An investigation by NPR and other outlets found evidence that the DOJ had withheld interviews by a wo...

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Fox News hosts generally seemed a bit panicked about how Trump would handle the speech. After Trump was finished Laura Ingraham praised him at length while Sean Hannity focused on trashing Democrats. The tone on the network was less than confident.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Trump’s mountain of broken promises, radical foreign policy decisions and unorthodox economic policies are causing deep damage to his MAGA brand.

Last week the Supreme Court, with three Trump appointees, ruled against Trump’s use of IEEPA to issue tariffs.

The court’s ruling was only one of many failures for Trump last week as newly revised jobs data showed a major contraction in the labor market last year. The trade deficit in 2025 showed little improvement despite Trump’s widespread use of tariffs and the fourth quarter GDP reading wa...