Fox News Urged Trump To Attack Iran. Now, They're In Full War Propaganda Mode.
Multiple Fox News hosts encouraged President Trump to attack Iran. They've since been carrying Trump's false war narratives while largely spinning his failures and miscalculations.
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If you’ve been watching Fox News coverage of the Iran War, it’s like taking a time machine back to 2003, ahead of the invasion of Iraq. Fox has gone into full war propaganda mode, uncritically projecting the Trump Administration’s narratives and making the case to their audience that this war with Iran is not only necessary, but succeeding.
Other mainstream outlets have, fortunately, done a better job, covering Trump’s shifting justifications, incoherent objectives, and clear strategic failures.
MS NOW remains one of the lone progressive voices in cable news. CNN, while they do have panels with Trump Admin defenders, their coverage has been largely critical and honest. Print media like The New York Times have produced revelatory coverage, including the visual investigation that revealed the Trump Administration was responsible for the strike on an Iranian school that killed over 175 people, most of them children.
These strikes aren’t popular throughout all of right-wing media either. We’re seeing fractures forming in New MAGA media, with right-wing personalities like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson opposing the war. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has also spoken out forcefully against the war.
On Fox News, however, diverging even from The Wall Street Journal’s coverage (also owned by Rupert Murdoch), we’ve seen an attempt to sell the Iran War to the American people. But it isn’t just the American people that Fox News has sold the war to. It’s the president himself.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has wanted the U.S. to help it launch a full-scale war on Iran for decades. Previous presidents have resisted. President Trump’s desperation level finally reached sufficient levels to be persuaded to join. And Fox News helped Netanyahu convince Trump.
President Trump reportedly refused to endorse Israeli strikes on Iran in April of last year. But in June, Israel went ahead and began striking Iran without the U.S. Fox News ramped up their coverage of the strikes, interviewing Israeli officials, praising Israel’s military campaign, inflating the threat of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and urging President Trump to join the strikes. Trump, liking the way the war was playing on Fox, joined the strikes by targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities, and was then praised by Fox for them. That effort became known as the 12-day war.
Fast forward to the end of February, and President Trump is still high off his capture of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, and Israel is gearing up for another effort. On Fox News, their coverage and media personalities began openly calling for President Trump to attack Iran.
On Friday, February 27, hours before the attack would launch, Fox Host Brian Kilmeade said, “I hope the president chooses to go at it. We have been looking at these headlines for 47 years, and we have an opportunity to end it. And this President likes to make history.”
Mark Levin told Fox News Host Sean Hannity that same night that, “This president knows right from wrong. He knows good from evil. He knows that this regime is a death cult. And he knows that there’s only really two countries that are prepared and willing to put an end to this.”
“We don’t need to put up with their crap,” Hannity replied. “It’s time to put it to an end.”
On Saturday, February 28, the Trump Administration launched joint strikes with Israel that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, along with much of Iran’s top leadership. In that opening wave of strikes, the Trump Administration also mistakenly struck an elementary school in the small Iranian town of Minab, killing over 175 people, 165 of them children.
Since then, Fox News has continued its pro-war propaganda, carrying water for the Trump Administration’s false narratives while ignoring their failures and miscalculations.
In an effort to get a bird’s-eye view to analyze right-wing coverage, I once again used Ground News. It’s a news site and app that analyzes articles from 50,000 news sources daily, tracks their bias, compares headlines, and showcases how each outlet is covering a given story, or if they’re covering it at all. It’s an excellent tool I use and have recommended to students for years in my media literacy and anti-disinformation guest lectures.
Fox News’ propaganda efforts have been applied to stories both big and small. Fox News even went as far as to air an old clip of Trump attending a dignified transfer for fallen soldiers because they didn’t want to show him disrespectfully wearing a baseball cap. They later apologized.
When it comes to spinning big stories, the strike on an Iranian school is one that did not get widespread coverage on Fox News.
When the initial strike occurred, and it wasn’t yet clear if the U.S. or Israel was responsible, Fox News did not cover the strike with a standalone segment at all, or at least it wasn’t published online, according to Ground News.
On March 7, The New York Times published its visual investigation, which found that the U.S. was likely responsible for the strike.
That same day, President Trump sought to blame Iran for the strike in a press gaggle on Air Force One. In this instance, Fox News aired the remarks uncritically and posted the clip online with this title:
When reports of an initial Pentagon investigation found that the strike was, in fact, likely executed by the U.S., Fox News was once again nowhere to be found in the Ground News database of 311 outlets that covered this development.
While there was a segment I found with one of the few good journalists working at Fox, Fox News Chief National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin, who pushed back on Trump’s claims about the school strike, it was just a quick moment, then back to their regularly scheduled programming.
While New MAGA media remains frayed, as they grapple with a base that was betrayed by Trump’s promise of “no new wars,” Fox News is essentially operating as state TV.
Fox does not just cover Trump. It shapes him. It helped sell this war before it started, and it is now selling the fiction that the war is going well.
That is not journalism. That is propaganda. And the American people are paying for it at the gas pump.
Fortunately, the propaganda is not working. A Quinnipiac University poll found 53 percent of voters oppose the US military action against Iran, while only 40 percent support it. Independents oppose it 60 to 31 percent. It also found that 74 percent of voters oppose sending ground troops into Iran, and even among Republicans, more oppose it than support it.
Across multiple other polls, a majority of Americans say the war makes the US less safe, not more. And 65 percent say the Trump Administration has not clearly explained the war's goals, according to The Washington Post.
Fox News can call this a strategic success all it wants. The American people are not buying it.
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Trying to keep up, Ahmed. Your work definitely helps.
WTF do you mean that Trump ACCIDENTALLY hit an elementary school killing mostly children? That IMO was no accident!!