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https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/17/media/fox-news-newsmax-ratings/index.html
"Fox News sucks! Fox News sucks! Fox News sucks!"
Those words were chanted in the streets of Washington, DC, this past weekend -- not by hordes of angry liberals but by disenchanted supporters of President Donald Trump.
For more than two decades, Fox News has conditioned its audience to distrust news that collides with its worldview or theirs.
Inconvenient facts have been dismissed and blamed on the "liberal media" or the "deep state" or one of the many other boogeymen favored by the right at any particular time.
But now that strategy could be catching up to the conservative cable channel, with rising competition from networks such as Newsmax and OAN, which have positioned themselves as Trumpier than Fox.
Indeed, Fox finds itself in a precarious position.
On one hand, the network needs to maintain a semblance of having a serious news operation and its news anchors have acknowledged the reality that Trump lost the election to Joe Biden.
On the other hand, the acknowledgment of reality is angering Fox's audience, some members of which are refusing to accept the truth of the matter and rebelling when it is force-fed to them.
And Trump, who is livid at Fox for calling Arizona for Biden on Election Night and for not supporting him as slavishly as he would like, has been encouraging those viewers to change the channel and tune into Newsmax or OAN.
Compounding the problem, the propagandists on Fox, like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, continue to undercut their own network's reporting by ludicrously suggesting that Trump could be correct to assert that something nefarious did actually take place to rig the election in favor of Biden.
"Fox News sucks! Fox News sucks! Fox News sucks!"
Those words were chanted in the streets of Washington, DC, this past weekend -- not by hordes of angry liberals but by disenchanted supporters of President Donald Trump.
For more than two decades, Fox News has conditioned its audience to distrust news that collides with its worldview or theirs.
Inconvenient facts have been dismissed and blamed on the "liberal media" or the "deep state" or one of the many other boogeymen favored by the right at any particular time.
But now that strategy could be catching up to the conservative cable channel, with rising competition from networks such as Newsmax and OAN, which have positioned themselves as Trumpier than Fox.
Indeed, Fox finds itself in a precarious position.
On one hand, the network needs to maintain a semblance of having a serious news operation and its news anchors have acknowledged the reality that Trump lost the election to Joe Biden.
On the other hand, the acknowledgment of reality is angering Fox's audience, some members of which are refusing to accept the truth of the matter and rebelling when it is force-fed to them.
And Trump, who is livid at Fox for calling Arizona for Biden on Election Night and for not supporting him as slavishly as he would like, has been encouraging those viewers to change the channel and tune into Newsmax or OAN.
Compounding the problem, the propagandists on Fox, like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, continue to undercut their own network's reporting by ludicrously suggesting that Trump could be correct to assert that something nefarious did actually take place to rig the election in favor of Biden.
