“Destructive propaganda machine”: How current and former staffers have ripped into Fox News

Mod: Lately Trump has ripped into Fox News for not kissing his ass with enough suitable devotion, but in the grand scheme of things he has gotten far better treatment than deserved.

“Destructive propaganda machine”: How current and former staffers have ripped into Fox News (Media Matters for Americalink): Fox News is a “destructive propaganda machine” whose right-wing hosts “don’t really have rules” and push “a political agenda” over “facts.” The network is “assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law,” “fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers,” and “wittingly harming our system of government for profit” while producing “birther-like coverage” that “feels like an extension of the Trump White House.”

That’s what current and former Fox employees have said since Donald Trump was elected president and his administration and the network effectively merged.

Big names like Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace have sought to hold space at Fox for more responsible reporting while publicly criticizing their more conspiracy-minded colleagues. Less prominent staffers keep quiet publicly but anonymously denounce the network and its biggest stars to other news outlets. And a handful have quit after years or even decades at the network, condemning Fox as they left.

Carl Cameron, Fox’s former chief political correspondent, is a member of that last group. One of Fox’s first employees, Cameron spent more than two decades reporting from the political campaign trail before retiring from the network in August 2017.

Cameron told CNN’s Brian Stelter that he had left in part because “the opinion hosts in prime time and elsewhere on Fox had become more than I could stand.” “I have no objection to opinion hosts,” he added, “but I do believe that it’s important that the information be accurate, fact-based, verifiable, and information that helps as opposed to hurt people in their effort to make a good decision when it comes to our politics.” He later said that the access some Fox hosts have to Trump“is questionable, if not dangerous,” adding that they “need to be understood as allied” with the president.

Former network strategic analyst Ralph Peters did a media tour after declining to renew his contract last March and criticized Fox’s sinister turn toward Trump. Bill Kristol, who spent years as a network contributor before leaving in 2012, has also slammed the network since Trump’s election. And longtime Fox reporters Adam Housley and Conor Powell both reportedly left due to similar concerns with the network’s direction. This group of five spent nearly 70 years combined at Fox.

Fox’s internal critics deserve few accolades. It may have taken Trump’s election for them to see it, but the network’s bigotry, conspiracy theories, and partisan machinations were built into its business model from the very beginning. And the effort they make to silo off the network’s “news” division and focus their critique solely on the “opinion” hosts shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the “news” division’s purpose in Fox’s corrupt propaganda machine.

Mod: There is much more to be found at the link.

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