Fox News Poll Shows Democrats With An Election Advantage

 

The charts above are from the Fox News Poll -- done between July 17th and 20th of a nationwide sample of 1,003 registered voters, with a 3 point margin of error.

Fox News Poll reflects How Far Trump Has Fallen

 

The charts above are from the Fox News Poll -- done between April 17th and 20th of a nationwide sample of 1,001 registered voters, with a 3 point margin of error.

Fox News Poll Shows Democrats With Current Advantage For 2026 Elections

 

The charts above are from the Fox News Poll -- done between January 23rd and 26th of a nationwide sample of 1,005 registered voters, with a 3 point margin of error.

Trump's Numbers Are Not Good In The New Fox Poll

 

The charts above are from the Fox News Poll -- done between September 6th and 9th of a nationwide sample of 1,004 registered voters, with a 3 point margin of error.

Most Voters Unhappy With Trump On Economy And Musk On DOGE Cuts

 

The charts above reflect the results of the Fox News Poll -- done between March 14th and 17th of a nationwide sample of 994 registered voters, with a 3 point margin of error.

You're Likely Funding Fox News (Even If You Don't Want To)

The following is part of a post by Dan Rather:

Fox is a loud and disciplined machine. It almost always speaks with one voice on any given topic. It has been convincing Americans 24/7 that even if they are doing ok, the economy is actually in tatters and the only person who can fix it is Trump — even if by any objective measure the US. economy under Trump was far worse.

Can a steady diet of Fox News alter one’s perception? You bet. The New York Times’snews surveys editor explained, “100 percent of the Republicans in our poll who said they got their news from Fox News or other conservative sources said they intended to support Mr. Trump in the general election. This stands in contrast to Republicans whose main media sources are outlets like CNN and major news organizations. 79 percent of them plan to vote for Mr. Trump, and 13 percent said they planned to vote for President Biden.”

Ironically, you and I are paying for this partisan and duplicitous media machine, whether we like it or not. If you’re a subscriber to almost any cable or satellite TV package, you’re funding Fox.

Yes, the organization that wakes up every day with the goal of demonizing Democrats in general and Joe Biden in particular is funded in a very bipartisan way. 

Fox is making billions from cable subscriber fees. It reportedly gets about $2 a month per subscriber. The mouth of the MAGA movement has long been bundled with other channels by all the big cable outfits, so even if you don’t want to pay for Fox, you have no choice. 

But things have taken a financial turn for Fox of late. Its penchant for falsehoods has cost the Murdochs. Dominion Voting Systems is now $787 million richer after a settlement with Fox over its lies and crazy conspiracy theories about Dominion’s voting machines. Add to that the loss of Tucker Carlson and what was the highest-rated show on the network. 

But don’t you worry about Fox’s bottom line. The media giant can and likely will ask for an increase in carriage fees in their next contract. One more dollar a month would mean hundreds of millions more for Murdoch. Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America, explains, “The impact of Dominion’s lawsuit was always going to be limited because of Fox’s ultimate weapon: cable carriage fees. The dirty secret about Fox News is that it is one of the only commercial TV channels that doesn’t need a single advertisement to be profitable, if not the only one. In fact, Fox could have zero dollars in ad revenue and still have at least a 35% profit margin. This is the result of carriage fees and the guaranteed revenue they provide Fox.”  

Fox Poll Shows Trump Maintains A Large Lead

 

The chart above is from the newest Fox News Poll -- done between October 6th and 9th of a nationwide sample of 1,007 registered voters. The margin of error for Republicans only is 4.5 points.

New Fox Poll Shows Trump Extending His Lead

The chart above is from the new Fox News Poll.

 

The Trump Indictments Have Increased MSNBC Viewership

 The following is part of a posting at Axios.com:

MSNBC has seen a boost in primetime ratings this summer, thanks in large part to its coverage of the slew of indictments against former President Donald Trump.

Why it matters: Fox News has been the undisputed cable news ratings leader for years. But Trump's legal woes, combined with Tucker Carlson's departure from Fox, have helped MSNBC close in on Fox News' prime-time lead several times in the past few months. 

Driving the news: MSNBC beat Fox News in primetime last Monday and Tuesday evenings thanks to its coverage of Trump's indictment in a fourth major case in Georgia over efforts to overturn the presidential election's outcome.

• Rachel Maddow's interview with Hillary Clinton after the indictment drew an unprecedented 3.9 million viewers on Monday evening. 
• The network narrowly beat Fox News in primetime on Monday, July 10, as well, although it surpassed Fox more consistently during the second quarter. 
• Mondays tend to be MSNBC's highest-rated primetime evenings, given that's when Maddow continues to regularly host her 9 p.m. show. 

Flashback: MSNBC starting to beat Fox News in primetime periodically following Carlson's departure in the April. 

• The network beat Fox News in primetime ratings for a full week in early June during its coverage of Trump's second indictment on charges relating to classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, ending Fox News' 120-week primetime winning streak.
• Throughout several points during the second quarter, MSNBC also beat Fox News in the prized 25-54 year-old advertising demographic.
• While most of the country is experiencing some level of fatigue over Trump's legal battles, MSNBC's viewership has increased with each subsequent indictment.

What's The Appropriate Punishment For Fox News?

The trial of Fox News is about to start. Dominion has asked for $1.6 billion in actual damages (and possibly more in a punitive judgement). There is no doubt that Fox owes that money, but is that all it owes? Doesn't it also owe its viewers the truth? Here's what Robert Reich thinks should happen:

The trial of Fox News begins today. If Dominion Voting Systems wins, I have a suggestion for what the court should demand of Fox News, in addition to paying damages for the harm to Dominion.

The judge has already ruled that on-air statements by Fox News hosts, asserting that Dominion’s voting machines played a role in causing Donald Trump to lose the 2020 election, were false. The task for the jury is to decide whether Fox made those false statements with actual malice.

If Dominion wins, it will be because Fox’s own internal emails, text messages, and depositions revealed that its hosts (and owner, Rupert Murdoch) knew that the allegations of election fraud by Trump and his allies were baseless but kept airing them anyway, in part because they feared that another right-wing network, Newsmax, would otherwise steal their audience. When Fox News reporters shot down the allegations publicly, the network’s big personalities complained internally that telling their viewers the truth was hurting the network’s brand.

To this day, Fox News viewers still don’t know the truth — neither about Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, nor about Fox News’s role in promoting Trump’s big lie. This is the real damage of the Fox News propaganda feedback loop: After inflaming right-wing conspiracy theories, Fox has a financial incentive to continue to push them in order to retain its inflamed audience, which further inflames them. 

The case that starts today raises a fundamental question: Will there be a penalty for profiting from the spread of dangerous misinformation?

Think of the poison Fox has knowingly been pumping into America as analogous to the poison cigarette manufacturers pumped into Americans’ lungs. Part of the remedy for the cigarette poison has been warning disclosures on every pack. Why not an analogous remedy for Fox News’s poison?

If Dominion wins, the court should order Fox News hosts — Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and all other hosts similarly implicated — to tell their viewers every half hour, at least until the end of 2024: 

“When we told you the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, we lied. Trump lied, too. He continues to lie. The 2020 election wasn’t stolen. Biden won fair and square.”

As on cigarette packs that must vary their warnings, the court should require alternative disclosures, perhaps every other week: 

“We apologize for lying to you about the 2020 election. There was no fraud. Biden won. We lied because we were afraid of losing ad revenue if we told the truth. Shame on us.”

And every third week: 

“The 2020 election wasn’t stolen from Trump. Trump made that up, and we repeated his lie because we’re greedy and unscrupulous. And that’s the truth.”

What do you think? Should Fox News be required to issue any other disclosure messages?

Public Dislikes Misinformation - Says Fox Should Be Punished

 

The charts above reflect the results of the new Quinnipiac University Poll -- done between March 9th and 13th of a nationwide sample of 1,635 registered voters, with a 2.4 point margin of error.

Fox Knew Trump Lied About Election Fraud & Didn't Care

 

Most of us knew that Fox News lies regularly to the public. This time they got caught doing it. There is evidence that they knew Trump's election fraud claims were not true, but they reported it as fact anyway.

Here what Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner had to say about it:

On the one hand, wow! What blatant hypocrisy. Such craven cynicism.

On the other hand, yep! Of course. No surprise here. What did we expect?

Those were but a few of the more restrained (and less profane) reactions to the revelations from court filings made public yesterday that the most famous Fox News hosts and other senior staff at the network — including owner Rupert Murdoch — pretty much agreed with the rest of the reality-based world that widespread voter fraud claims around the 2020 presidential election were pure, unadulterated horse manure. 

This is blockbuster news. It’s also completely predictable. These people are not stupid, and they are not completely disconnected from what the rest of us see. They read the same newspapers, even if they pretend not to. They hobnob in the New York media scene. Their kids often go to elite private schools. They just know that their business models — and their millions — depend on presenting a very different set of “facts” (as in, non-facts) to their viewers. 

We now can read the words that the likes of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham never meant us to see. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, they were mocking Trump’s purveyors of the Big Lie, such as Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, in their private communications. 

According to reporting by The New York Times, Carlson and Ingraham were sharing text messages in the wake of the election that would have been a surprise to their viewers, to say the least:

“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Mr. Carlson wrote to Ms. Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020.

 

Ms. Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”

The revelations come from a lawsuit being filed by Dominion Voting Systems, makers of voting machines that were regularly vilified on Fox News as part of a vast conspiracy to deprive Donald Trump of reelection. The company is suing Fox for defamation. And many legal experts think the impact can be huge — “a case that poses considerable financial and reputational risk for the country’s most-watched cable news network,” according to The Times. A  good summation, although perhaps “news network” should be in quotation marks.

 

What Fox News is alleged to have done (and the evidence is pretty damning), deserves to be front-page news. And we might be getting only a glimpse of what's to come. Much of the released filing was redacted. And Fox News sure hopes it remains hidden. 

What does emerge, however, is that Fox News was worried in the aftermath of the election — and for good reason. Their viewers seemed to be more loyal to Trump than to Fox, and the network risked losing audience share to the even nuttier corners of the right-wing media alternative universe (like Newsmax and OAN) if they didn’t echo Trumpworld’s fevered waves of disinformation and outright lies. That when faced with the choice of protecting American democracy or their own bottom line they chose the latter should also surprise no one. 

But it should not be normalized or accepted. 

Reporters are humans, like everyone else, and thus are fallible. We make mistakes, information that we thought was true can change, and we are sometimes limited by our own assumptions, backgrounds, and biases. The craft of responsible journalism recognizes these vulnerabilities and builds systems with checks and balances that are meant to help our readers and viewers get to as much of a responsible version of the truth as is humanly possible. 

News organizations worthy of the name believe the stories they distribute. Their reporters believe what they report. Their writers believe what they write. And their anchors believe what they say on the air.

These Fox News personalities and the corporation that pays them were not trying to do any of this. Their programs became echo chambers for egregiousness. They knew truth, and they knew fiction. And they deliberately peddled falsehoods.

 

It was a calculated business decision. And that means that whatever business Fox News is in, it isn’t the news business. 

To paraphrase Captain Renault from the movie Casablanca, I'm shocked! Shocked to find that lying is going on in there.

Sadly, what we’re talking about here is not a line from a film, and it’s not a joke. This is serious business raising serious questions about the future of our country. 

NO! Hillary Did NOT Pay Hackers To Spy On Trump!

Jesse Watters of Fox News, and many other right-wingers, are claiming that a court filing from DOJ attorney Durham proves that Hillary Clinton paid hackers to spy on Donald Trump. That is simply not true. Durham's filing says no such thing, and the claim that it does is just another right-wing lie.

From PolitiFact.com.

Fox Viewers Are More Likely To Believe Conspiracies

 It has been known for a while now that Fox News viewers are more ignorant of what is really happening in this country. That has been shown by several respected polls and studies. That's because Fox News doesn't bring viewers all the news -- just the news they think makes Republicans look good.

But it is even worse than that. As the charts above show (from the Washington Post / University of Maryland Poll), the Republicans that watch Fox News are more prone to believe conspiracies than Republicans that don't watch Fox -- and the difference is statistically significant.

Fox doesn't just cherry pick the news it likes, it also gives air time to conspiracy theories from right-wing Republicans. This makes their viewers not only ignorant, but conspiracy theory believers. The truth is that Fox is not a news channel. It is a propaganda channel for the Republican Party.