On KPFA's UpFront, Matt Gertz explains that Fox News has been deliberately replacing its so-called “straight news” programming with extremist opinion hosts since the presidential election
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Matt Gertz explains that Fox News has been deliberately replacing its so-called "straight news" programming with extremist opinion hosts since the presidential election
Citation From the February 11, 2021, edition of KPFA's UpFront
BRIAN EDWARDS-TIEKERT (HOST): I’m curious about larger editorial moves that the network’s making. There’s always been kind of a division of labor within Fox between the news people, which are mostly on during the day, and the commentary people, who are show hosts in prime time in the evening, typically with the highest ratings and the most bombastic rhetoric. This is the Sean Hannitys and the Tucker Carlsons. It was the news side of Fox that made that early call of Arizona on election night, the decision desk — pretty straight-shooting statistics people who normally work in a dark, windowless room tweaking spreadsheets so that they can feed stuff to the news side of the operation. What’s happening in terms of Fox’s on-air presentation and the balance between those two things?
MATT GERTZ (MEDIA MATTERS SENIOR FELLOW): That firewall between news and opinion has been blown apart since the election, both by Fox News deliberately replacing hours that were devoted to news with more right-wing opinion -- the 7 p.m. hour was previously Martha MacCallum's straight-news show, it's now sort of a rotating group of right-wing hosts who are basically trying out for having that time slot going forward. The network released yesterday that Greg Gutfeld, another one of these right-wing hosts, is taking over the 11 p.m. hour, which is currently a news show hosted by Shannon Bream. So, it’s going to be 7 p.m. to midnight all right-wing talk. Now, the supposed news hours themselves are also getting significantly more exposure through these right-wing hosts. Those programs are now regularly airing clips of the prime-time hosts as news items in and of themselves, as jumping off points for their panel discussions. This morning, just a few minutes before we started talking, that news side aired Tucker Carlson saying last night that Democrats weren’t really endangered during the insurrection and using that as a hook for the network’s programming. And we're just seeing that has really escalated since the election. It’s something that they are doing quite regularly. They think that they can rebuild their ratings by giving their audience more of what they perceive that audience wants, which is that right-wing red meat aimed at their base, rather than news reporting or anything of that kind.