Last week, the former president of the United States and current leader of the Republican Party sat for dinner with a famous anti-Semite and a far less famous but somehow more vile white supremacist.
It’s an enormous controversy and one with vast political implications: the meeting has exposed fissures within the GOP and significantly altered the political calculus for 2024.
And yet? The top-rated cable news channel has almost entirely ignored the story, making it an outlier among other news outlets, including Breitbart.
How come?
News broke early Friday morning of Donald Trump’s dinner with open anti-Semite Kanye West and brazen white supremacist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. Since then, a wave of condemnations has followed, washing over Trump’s shoulder shrug “didn’t know they guy” explanations.
But even serious Republican leaders, long exhausted by Trump’s lack of discipline and judgment, have piled on in a rare form of condemnation of the former president that the political world has never seen before. Simply put, Trump f*cked up.
But shockingly, Fox News has almost entirely ignored the story. In the roughly 100 hours of programming since the news broke, the dinner has been mentioned just three times that I can find by searching transcript database TVEyes.
The top-rated shows on the network have entirely ignored the story.
The first mention was during Friday’s Special Report, guest-hosted by Gillian Turner. During the “Winners and Losers” segment, Juan Williams named West loser for “doing Trump zero favors” by bringing Fuentes to dinner with him at Mar-a-Lago.
Reporting from Nantucket, Lucas Tomlinson introduced a clip of ith President Joe Biden not commenting on the controversial dinner, though the Fox News reporter cited no specifics.
Axios reporter Jonathan Swan also mentioned the dinner during a Fox News Sunday panel discussion hosted by Jennifer Griffin, noting how Trump “invites one notorious anti-semite to dinner, Kanye West, and he shows up with another anti-semite.
Both Griffin and Turner are among the most highly respected on-air news talent at Fox News and have refrained from boosting Trump
The most thorough coverage came on Sunday’s MediaBuzz, hosted by Howard Kurtz, in which guest Meghan McCain lashed out at Trump, as most reasonable people are doing. Kurtz ended that segment curiously, however, by asking a fellow panelist if the media backlash against the former president for hosting a white supremacist was justified… what?
Monday night, former Vice President Mike Pence even weighed in on the scandal and called for Trump to apologize in a lengthy interview with NewsNation anchor Leland Vittert. A former VP publicly calling for the president he served alongside to apologize is a major story — and yet it has not been mentioned on Fox News.
One excuse might be that Fox News views Kanye West, who relishes in the attention drawn by such stunts, as a sideshow unworthy of serious coverage.
But that explanation crumbles once you recall the ample airtime they gave the troubled rapper when he wore a “White Lives Matter” shirt in Paris last month. Or the lengthy interview Tucker Carlson gave “Ye” which aired over two episodes of his prime time show, in which Carlson repeatedly stressed that West was a serious and perhaps brilliant thinker who should be taken seriously. (Curiously, Carlson’s producers edited out West’s blatantly anti-Semitic comments from the interview before presenting the rapper as sensible.)
Fox News was eager to cover Kanye when it was politically expedient — look, a popular celebrity loves Trump! — but now that his pro-Trump rhetoric has devolved into full-blown anti-Semitism, they look the other way.
Mediaite reached out to Fox News for an explanation, but they have not yet replied.
So why is Fox News ignoring this story? Well, it seems clear that Fox is less committed to “news”— as it is traditionally considered — and far more committed to promoting a narrative. Now, critics of the competition would argue every cable news network is guilty of such journalistic sins, but there is an inarguable difference in scale and degree.
The approach to news has undoubtedly brought dominant ratings and record-setting revenues to Fox News while CNN and NBC News plan layoffs. But warning signs for the network can be seen within the Republican Party, which is facing a potentially catastrophic identity crisis between establishment Republicans and MAGA fanatics.
Given the results of the midterms and the last few elections, Fox News might be winning the cable news battle, but what cost victory?
The writer of this story is a contributor to NewsNation.
Note: the post was updated after originally being published to include Lucas Tomlinson introducing a clip of Biden not commenting on the dinner.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
