Fox News has become Trump's propaganda arm, CNN's media reporter says

Donald Trump has taken over Fox News, slowly squeezing out actual news reporting in favor of opinion shows promoting the president, Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media correspondent, told the National Press Club Tuesday.

Stelter, the author of “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,” said he talked to about 250 present and former Fox News employees who were eager to tell him what was happening since founder Roger Ailes was forced out.

“Fox’s history is a series of right-wing turns, moving further to the right, in some cases doing that just to keep up with the audience,” he said.

A lot of that reflects what has happened to the Republican Party and conservative audiences after decades of Rush Limbaugh’s radio shows and Bill O’Reilly’s Fox program as conservative talk show hosts fought each other for ratings by being more and more outrageous.

The Fox audience “wants pro-Trump propaganda. It does not want news,"  Stelter said. The hosts are competing to see who “can be the Trumpian of them all. They have become Trumpier and Trumpier ever single year.”

That left Fox’s news reporters and anchors, such as Chris Wallace and Bret Baier, feeling “suffocated” as they try to maintain journalism standards. For example, he said, when national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin confirmed much of The Atlantic’s reporting about Trump disparaging military veterans who died in service to the country, her report was minimalized and not mentioned on the Fox commentary programs.

Any other news outlet would have played it every hour, he said.

The problem is that Trump is getting so much of his information from the Fox talk shows, and that is “driving Trump to make mistakes, to lie to the public and to be misinformed," Stelter said. "He hears something on 'Fox and Friends' that’s untrue and he repeats it, and then the whole country is talking about it.”

That information is not coming from any well-researched sources, he said.

“That’s what's broken today,” Stelter said. “It’s not as if Fox and Friends are giving him the highest quality information. Instead it’s a bunch of overworked producers, working terrible hours and trying to get a show on the air who make mistakes that end up hurting the president, and that’s where we are.”

In the history of American journalism, no other major news organization has had such blind loyalty to a public official, he said.

“There’s a Grand Canyon-size divide between mostly conservatives and mostly right-wing individuals who say they do not trust the media," he said. "That means they do trust Fox and Breitbart. But they don’t trust the rest."

Everyone else may be skeptical about the news media, and have their questions and concerns, but they still ultimately rely on it, Stelter said.

“The positive thing is that most Americans see through the lies about the media,” he said. “You have these polls that ask, 'Who do you believe, Trump or the media?' And most of them choose the press. There’s a widespread view that the press is a check and balance. And then there’s this alternative minority view that the press is a menace and an enemy.”