Fox News’ reason for existence is to take down the Democratic Party and the wider left in America. So it is strange that in the past month, the administration of a Democratic president has sent the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security to sit for interviews with the network.
It’s even stranger that nearly every day of the week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki gives Peter Doocy, the network’s representative in the White House press corps, an opportunity to throw right-wing propaganda at her that is endlessly churned on the network for the ensuing 24 hours.
It’s not just strange. It’s stupid and it’s counterproductive.
Democrats – both leaders and voters – have an extremely incorrect and naïve view on Fox News. They understand that it is conservative, but they sincerely believe that appearing on the network is a way to reach a percentage of conservative voters that can be used to bolster Democratic campaigns.
The problem is that those sorts of Fox viewers are rarer than unicorns and the negatives of appearing on Fox far outweigh the remote possibility that an appearance by Sec. Alexander Mayorkas to hear from Chris Wallace about how the administration should build a border wall will lead to the scales falling from the eyes of this mythical viewer.
Fox watchers are diehard conservatives, and they tune in to the network to watch the hosts and anchors beat up on Democrats and liberals. That is the goal of every hour of the network’s programming.
When Democrats appear on Fox, they send a signal to those viewers and the wider world that Fox is a legitimate venue that “even Democrats” feel compelled to appear on. It puts Fox in the same category as other real networks and not the white supremacist propaganda that it is.
That is not an exaggeration. Fox’s prime time hosts – Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham – explain to their audiences on a regular basis that Blacks are criminal animals, that Latino and Muslim immigrants are here to replace white people, and worse.
Fox News has been the source of more bigotry injected into the national American discourse over the last 25 years than the Ku Klux Klan.
Yet Democrats continue to give this bile their tacit support by continually feeding the network.
It is true that Psaki gets the best of Doocy in all of their exchanges. She is smarter than him and is able to undermine the premise of his questioning. Watching their exchanges in social media clips certainly gives a rush of endorphins to most left of center people who watch them.
But it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Like Sec. Pete Buttigieg’s appearances on Fox, the endorphin rush fades away quickly. What remains is video evidence of Democrats treating Fox as legitimate, which Fox then uses to sell thousands of hours of lies to its audience, usually about those same Democrats.
In 2019 during the presidential election, Sen. Bernie Sanders appeared on Fox for a town hall. Sanders competently presented his vision for the world and communicated his platform.
Fox then spent the next 24 hours using the footage of Sanders to repeatedly attack, distort, and smear progressive ideas.
This is what Fox does, it is at the core of their being.
The appearance did not help Sanders’ campaign obtain the nomination, nor did it assist the other Democratic campaigns who went to Fox to host town halls for them. In fact, the eventual Democratic ticket of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris never went to Fox for town halls.
The candidates also did not sit with Fox for interviews during the campaign and ended up nonetheless convincing over 81.2 million Americans to vote for them over Donald Trump, the losing candidate who spent most of his life on Fox News.
For good things to triumph in America, Fox News must be beaten and not engaged. The sooner Democrats stop feeding Fox News the further along we can move towards better things.
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One of the first political bloggers in the world, Oliver Willis has operated OliverWillis.com since 2000. Contributor at Media Matters for America and The American Independent. Follow on Twitter at @owillis. Full bio.