Fox News has long entrenched itself as a pro-Donald Trump propaganda network dedicated to broadcasting, defending, and justifying the words and actions of the president-elect and his cronies. While Trump and Fox News regularly critique the “mainstream media” as corrupt, biased ideologues, the network itself is no stranger to bending the rules of ethics to suit their own political project.
According to the upcoming book Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power by Politico’s Alex Isenstadt, a Fox News insider fed Trump’s team questions prepared by hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum ahead of an Iowa town hall with the network in January of last year.
“About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start, a senior aide started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox. Holy s–t, the team thought. They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started,” Isenstadt writes. The excerpt was provided exclusively to CNN.
The prepared questions touched on various soft spots for Trump, including his plans to seek revenge on politician rivals, and pressing him to “disavow political violence.” Upon being fed the questions, “Trump was pissed,” Isenstadt writes, feeling that they were “attacks designed to put him on the defensive.”
According to Isenstadt, the tipoff from the network insider allowed Trump and his preparation team to workshop their answers ahead of the town hall.
The breach of journalistic ethics takes on an added layer of hypocrisy given that after getting trounced in his September debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump baselessly accused ABC News of having “rigged” the contest against him and demanded they be stripped of their broadcasting license.
“They had a rigged show with somebody that maybe even had the answers. I mean, I’ll be honest. I watched her talk, and I said, you know, she seems awfully familiar with the questions, and you get pretty good at that stuff after a while,” Trump complained to Fox News at the time.
In a statement provided to CNN in response to the excerpt from Isenstadt’s book, Fox News said that “while we do not have any evidence of this occurring, and Alex Isenstadt has conveniently refused to release the images for fact checking, we take these matters very seriously and plan to investigate should there prove to be a breach within the network.”
Given that Trump has selected several major Fox News personalities to serve in high level positions within his proposed cabinet and administrations, it’s unlikely that any internal investigation will produce results that would in any way anger the president-elect.
