With the election less than a week away, Donald Trump has been pulling out all the stops and going after anyone he sees as a threat to his re-election. Today the target was, surprisingly enough, Fox News, the president’s unofficial channel. After the network aired Barack Obama‘s Florida rally for Joe Biden over the weekend, Trump tweeted, “Now @FoxNews is playing Obama’s no crowd, fake speech for Biden, a man he could barely endorse because he couldn’t believe he won.” He later told reporters that Fox’s coverage of Obama would not have happened if disgraced former Fox chairman and CEO Roger Ailes was still running the show, calling the network “disappointing.” Ailes infamously left Fox in 2016 after multiple allegations of sexual assault from both current and former employees and died the following year.
During his presidency, Fox News has been Trump’s go-to arena, and while other media networks have been labeled by the president as “fake news,” Fox is the place he has gone to with a scoop, a rant, or just to be seen. While Fox has made it a point to echo all of Trump’s rhetoric, including downplaying COVID-19 (which has now hit their staff) and defending white supremacists, the network is still ostensibly a national news channel meant to cover events of note occurring in the country—like the rally of a former president. Not that Trump would agree: At his rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Monday night, he made cracks about Obama’s “flaws”: “And then they say, ‘Ohhhh, he’s so rhetorically good.’ I never thought he was a good speaker, personally. I really never did. And they say, ‘He’s so handsome, he’s so handsome.’ Oh.”
The relative minor slight from the president aside, Fox continues to carry water for Trump and paint him as a victim of a biased press. According to Media Matters, guests on Monday’s episodes of Fox & Friends and Maria Bartiromo‘s Fox Business show returned to their favorite story in the last weeks of the election: the Hunter Biden email “scandal,” which no credible outlet has been able to verify. “Why aren’t Hunter Biden’s dealings being covered far and wide by every mainstream newspaper or media organization? Because they are in the bag for anything that is left-wing and liberal, and that is frightening,” Dagen McDowell told Bartiromo on Monday.
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