(CNN)If you turned on Fox News on Thursday night to catch the ongoing Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump -- only the third time in American history a president has faced such a proceeding -- you were sorely disappointed.
Fox wasn't showing the trial -- as CNN and MSNBC were. Instead, Fox ran its usual primetime lineup of pro-Trump voices with the trial confined to a small corner of the screen, without sound. Sean Hannity, the network's flagship host, called the entire impeachment trial a "snoozefest." The previous night, when Fox again ran its primetime lineup rather than live coverage of the impeachment trial, Hannity noted: "If I were a terrible host. I would force you to endure watching the regurgitation, the repetition ... the insanity that has gone on all day."
Unless you have spent the last few years on another planet, that programming decision won't surprise you. Fox has relentlessly promoted and defended Trump -- and he has responded in kind by showering its hosts with coveted interviews.
But what's terrifying about how Fox News is choosing to cover (or not cover) the impeachment trial is revealed in new polling from the Pew Research Center delving into trust (or lack thereof) in the media.
Asked to name media companies in which they have trust, 65% of Republicans named Fox News. One in 3 named ABC. And that's it. Not a single other news source was trusted by even 33% of self-identified Republicans in the Pew poll.
That's in stark contrast to both Democrats and the population at large. More than 1 in 3 Democrats named 13 media sources they trust. The general public named 8: ABC (48% trusted), CNN (47%), NBC (47%), CBS (45%), Fox News (43%), PBS (42%), BBC (35%), The New York Times (35%) and MSNBC (34%). (Note: The pollsters went through 30 media sources with the respondents.)
Here's the full chart:
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| Click to enlarge |
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/24/politics/donald-trump-fox-news/index.html
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