This might be a minor issue in progressive messaging, but conservatives are not watching fox news like they used to. I’m sure a small percentage is, but most MAGAs I know personally believe that Fox news betrayed Trump, and they’ve switched to watching Newsmax. Also, talking to my MAGA friends and family, they believe that Newsmax is the only truly ‘conservative’ and thus reliable source of information, and every other source of journalism is just liberal propaganda, including Fox News. I don’t exactly know what to do with this insight but I’ve realized that progressives and liberals keep attacking Fox News and I don’t think most of us have realized that Conservatives have switched to a more underground right wing propaganda source. Just for clarification, I dont think Fox News is liberal in any way, shape, or form, but that’s what some MAGA people I’ve talked to think. Edit: I think the danger is that the MAGA propoganda machine has gone underground, and fox news is a decoy to distract everyone from what they really think.
I think the real question is always which one Trump is watching, used to be able to tell because he’d tweet on the same “topic of the day” that fox was playing
led to a feedback loop where fox would bring up one of their ridiculous talking points in the morning with the usual “some people are saying”, trump would tweet about it, then the messaging on fox would switch to “the president says”
Exactly, and the founder of Newsmax (Christopher Ruddy) has been a close friend of trump for 20 years. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Trump is approving stories before they go out, if not directly telling them what to report on.
More likely that the control flow goes the other direction, and it’s the Newsmax guy telling Trump what to think.