When two unflattering reports appeared...

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2024

...Fox & Friends swung into action: Ainsley Earhardt wasn't present on the Fox & Friends couch today. For that reason, the four friends this morning were these:

Fox & Friends co-hosts, October 23, 2024
Steve Doocy
Brian Kilmeade
Lawrence Jones
Kayleigh McEnany (substitute friend)

We think it's important to start saying their names. With the Internet Archive down again—the victim of a cyberattack—we'll be working from this post by Colby Hall over at Mediaite.

This morning, at 7:15 Eastern, the four friends swung into action. At issue was a pair of unflattering reports about Candidate Donald J. Trump.

Under current arrangements, the friends are paid, by their corporate owners, to propagandize on behalf of Candidate Trump. The goal is to wash the brains of viewers of any concerns about Candidate Trump. As we've previously noted, this practice is modeled on the 2004 Hollywood film of this name:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

This morning, a certain circumstance needed to be addressed. Two (2) unflattering reports had appeared about Candidate Trump. One report was in The Atlantic, the other was in the New York Times.

With the Internet Archive down again, we can't conduct a full check of the way these two reports were handled in the course of the program's three hours. As part of his report for Mediaite, Hall offers videotape of one four-minute segment—a segment which helps the discerning observer see the nature of corporate "cable news" propaganda and the role it now plays in our lives.

For starters, sad! Hall doesn't call attention to this fact, but the friends only mention the report about Trump which appears in The Atlantic. The lengthy interview with General John Kelly which appears in the New York Times goes unmentioned by the friends as they complete their corporate rounds in the segment for which Hall has provided videotape.

Hall does cite an obvious problem with the service provided by the four friends. We offer a quick bit of background:

It fell to the friends to assure Fox viewers that the unflattering accounts of Trump's behavior in The Atlantic can't possibly be right. That said, it seems to us that the unflattering report in the New York Times is far more striking than the corresponding piece in The Atlantic.  

The Atlantic piece is largely recap of prior reporting. The report in the Times includes extensive audiotape of General Kelly talking about the endless array of peculiar things Trump said to him during the eighteen months he spent as President Trump's second chief of staff.

(As president, Trump had four chiefs of staff in all.)

At any rate, the friends were required to give the impression that any such unflattering claims simply couldn't be right. At one point, Hall spies an apparent implausibility in the path the four friends trod:

HALL (10/23/24): McEnany has consistently claimed that John Kelly’s retelling of a private conversation he had with Trump in Normandy, in which the 45th president allegedly labeled US soldiers buried in a cemetery as “suckers and losers” has been debunked—though there is no way that she could disprove Kelly’s account.

[..]

It’s not clear how she can reasonably conclude how a private conversation “never happened,” but if she believes that to be true, then she is clearly saying that John Kelly is lying about what he says the former president told him personally.

Is General Kelly lying about that alleged statement by Trump? In the New York Times report, Kelly recounts a wide array of strange remarks President Trump allegedly made. He also says that Trump made remarks of the "suckers and losers" type on an array of occasions.

Skillfully, the four friends simply disappear the detailed Times report. Along the way, Jones, the dumbest and most self-assured of the four regular friends, claims to blast the whole kerfuffle to smithereens by offering an account of the circumstance in which the "suckers and losers" comment was supposedly made.

The circumstance described by Jones doesn't seem to jibe with The Atlantic's reporting, or with Kelly's statements to the Times.

Is Donald J. Trump "a fascist?" You can hear General Kelly state that view as part of the extensive New York Times videotape.

Perhaps for that reason, the friends fail to mention the existence of the Times report. Instead, they pick out a statement from The Atlantic and allege that they've shot it down.

The friends are hired by the corporation to convey such impressions—to keep pro-Trump minds "spotless." Morning Joe performs a similar function for Blue America's cable news viewers, though to a substantially lesser extent and in a less stupid manner.

Under current arrangements, our nation's journalistic discourse lies in ruins. The Internet Archive is still down, the victim of a cyberattack.

Under the direction of Suzanne Scott, the Fox News Channel conducts a fraud against the American people on a round-the-clock basis. Sadly, it's hard to report the way this scam has worked in this current instance with the Internet Archive still down.

Pray for Rosemary's baby, the deep state once said. At this site, we pray for the Archive!