A primer on America’s screwy mediascape unfolded on the Oct. 11 edition of Sean Hannity’s Fox News program. In his coverage of the Senate race in Pennsylvania between Republican Mehmet Oz and Democrat John Fetterman, Hannity highlighted some comments by reporter Dasha Burns on MSNBC regarding her interview with Fetterman, the 53-year-old Pennsylvania lieutenant governor.
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“Just in some of the small talk prior to the interview before the closed captioning was up and running, it did seem that he had a hard time understanding our conversations,” said Burns, an NBC News correspondent. The candidate suffered a stroke in May and has auditory processing difficulties; he uses closed-captioning technology in interviews.
After playing those comments for his viewers, Hannity dropped in a disclosure: “Now, by the way, that was on MS ‘DNC’ and see, they’re even raising concerns.” Boldface added to highlight a critical word in the Hannity canon. “Even,” in this context, is the host’s way of claiming that MSNBC remains an appendage of liberal media but it had to yield to reality in this instance.
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The real reality is a bit different: While Fox News remains a talking-point-promotion outlet for Republican candidates, its liberal counterpart on the cable box does something vastly different for Democratic candidates. It covers them, that is. That’s an enduring lesson from the Burns drama.
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Hannity doesn’t have a lot of new moves. He has been with Fox News since 1996, the network’s founding year. He makes few waves because his attacks and rhetoric are so predictable. Like Trump, he uses repetition as a weapon, clearly figuring that with enough iterations, his audience will buy in.
The Oz-Fetterman campaign is a decent example. Night after night, Hannity voices the same critiques of Fetterman and seizes on all available news morsels favorable to the Oz campaign. Over five programs toward the end of the midterm campaign, for instance, Hannity called on Fetterman to “drop out of the race for his own well-being” (Oct. 26); said he was “not fit to serve” (Oct. 27); ripped him as a “trust fund brat in a hoodie” (Oct. 28); ripped him as a “trust fund brat” (Oct. 31); ripped him as a “socialist trust-fund brat who never worked a day in his life in a hoodie” (Nov. 1).
Many critics over the years have posited that MSNBC is the lefty mirror image of Fox News. If so, it needs to pick up its game in the propaganda department. There’s no question that it can be more hospitable to Fetterman and his Democratic peers than Fox News and some other outlets. Following Fetterman’s debate troubles, for example, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell compared him to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. And Rebecca Traister, who wrote a Fetterman profile for New York magazine, provided a sanguine viewpoint on the candidate’s debate performance. “I think it’s tough to say whether or not it will wind up being an asset with voters,” said Traister in a discussion with MSNBC’s Alex Wagner shortly after the debate. “But it was certainly an example of such remarkable transparency.”
Yet MSNBC has no analogue to Hannity, a guy with the message discipline of a coxswain. Nor does it relish forking over its airwaves to promotional interviews with like-minded candidates. According to Media Matters for America, Fox News hosted Republican candidates in eight top Senate races “more than twice as frequently as MSNBC and CNN hosted their Democratic opponents — combined.”
The comparison, however, goes far deeper than MSNBC. Mainstream outlets writ large simply don’t do for Democrats what Fox News does for Republicans, an argument recently advanced by Media Matters senior fellow Matthew Gertz.
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“Just in some of the small talk prior to the interview before the closed captioning was up and running, it did seem that he had a hard time understanding our conversations,” said Burns, an NBC News correspondent. The candidate suffered a stroke in May and has auditory processing difficulties; he uses closed-captioning technology in interviews.
After playing those comments for his viewers, Hannity dropped in a disclosure: “Now, by the way, that was on MS ‘DNC’ and see, they’re even raising concerns.” Boldface added to highlight a critical word in the Hannity canon. “Even,” in this context, is the host’s way of claiming that MSNBC remains an appendage of liberal media but it had to yield to reality in this instance.
ADVERTISING
The real reality is a bit different: While Fox News remains a talking-point-promotion outlet for Republican candidates, its liberal counterpart on the cable box does something vastly different for Democratic candidates. It covers them, that is. That’s an enduring lesson from the Burns drama.
Follow Erik Wemple's opinionsFollow
Hannity doesn’t have a lot of new moves. He has been with Fox News since 1996, the network’s founding year. He makes few waves because his attacks and rhetoric are so predictable. Like Trump, he uses repetition as a weapon, clearly figuring that with enough iterations, his audience will buy in.
The Oz-Fetterman campaign is a decent example. Night after night, Hannity voices the same critiques of Fetterman and seizes on all available news morsels favorable to the Oz campaign. Over five programs toward the end of the midterm campaign, for instance, Hannity called on Fetterman to “drop out of the race for his own well-being” (Oct. 26); said he was “not fit to serve” (Oct. 27); ripped him as a “trust fund brat in a hoodie” (Oct. 28); ripped him as a “trust fund brat” (Oct. 31); ripped him as a “socialist trust-fund brat who never worked a day in his life in a hoodie” (Nov. 1).
Many critics over the years have posited that MSNBC is the lefty mirror image of Fox News. If so, it needs to pick up its game in the propaganda department. There’s no question that it can be more hospitable to Fetterman and his Democratic peers than Fox News and some other outlets. Following Fetterman’s debate troubles, for example, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell compared him to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. And Rebecca Traister, who wrote a Fetterman profile for New York magazine, provided a sanguine viewpoint on the candidate’s debate performance. “I think it’s tough to say whether or not it will wind up being an asset with voters,” said Traister in a discussion with MSNBC’s Alex Wagner shortly after the debate. “But it was certainly an example of such remarkable transparency.”
Yet MSNBC has no analogue to Hannity, a guy with the message discipline of a coxswain. Nor does it relish forking over its airwaves to promotional interviews with like-minded candidates. According to Media Matters for America, Fox News hosted Republican candidates in eight top Senate races “more than twice as frequently as MSNBC and CNN hosted their Democratic opponents — combined.”
The comparison, however, goes far deeper than MSNBC. Mainstream outlets writ large simply don’t do for Democrats what Fox News does for Republicans, an argument recently advanced by Media Matters senior fellow Matthew Gertz.