Fox News Created a Monster. And Now That Monster Wants Revenge.
Fox News now “sucks,” election-denying Trumpkins say. And so it’s a race to the bottom for other outlets to appeal to an audience hoping to further remove themselves from reality.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
As early as Wednesday, Nov. 4, the day after polls closed around the country, supporters of President Donald Trump were amassing to protest what they believed to be a conspiracy to steal the election from their president. They wore Make America Great Again hats and waved Trump 2020 flags, and some brandished semi-automatic weapons, a familiar sight at pro-Trump rallies in open-carry states. But what was surprising this time around was that many of Trump’s supporters weren’t only harassing and decrying the usual media enemies—CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times—but were chanting “Fox News Sucks.”
In monitoring pro-Trump communications, it’s been a refrain that many of his loyalists consider Fox “fake news” and that it’s as complicit in slandering their leader as much as any of the other networks. In the same breath, they have lauded a few of Fox’s personalities, including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, while making it clear, in the same breath, that Fox is part of the “deep state” conspiracy to bring Trump down.
In Detroit, at the protests, The Guardian was able to find a supporter in shock that Fox had acquiesced and begun to depict an inconceivable reality in which Trump was being defeated by Democratic challenger Joe Biden. “Fox, you can’t even trust them,” Rob Phail lamented. “They’re the worst chameleons of all. So, you’re like, OK, who do you trust?”