As my colleague Molly Schwartz neatly sums up, the lies, obfuscations, and dizzying talking points of Fox News are bad. Exposing them is good. We’ve known this forever, but it is freshly necessary to corroborate, investigate, and understand the big picture and the small, to see how we got here. In case you missed the steady skewering that Fox and Trump took last week by CNN’s chief media correspondent, Brian Stelter, in conversation with Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery, catch it here. With Jeffery’s pinpoint questions, he assesses whether Fox explains Trump or Trump explains Fox, or each explains the other in a dance of propaganda and power trading. He dishes on what Fox insiders told him for his book Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. It’s all laid out, the horror and the humor, the madness and the bleakly fascinating details.
“You say that Hoax is essentially about the Foxification of Trump and the Trumpification of Fox,” the conversation begins. “Who leads this dance, the president or the network?” The answer is good. (Back to good-good news tomorrow. Today we welcome, for a midweek lift, good-bad news.) Reach us with personal stories and good-good recharges at recharge@motherjones.com.
