On Monday, Jonathan Kott — a former aide to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) — appeared on a panel hosted by Fox News' Harris Faulkner, and recalled when former President Donald Trump dined with an avowed Nazi at his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022. Faulkner then bristled at his comment. Washington Post columnist Philip Bump opined that Faulkner's refusal to acknowledge that event is likely due to her employer's refusal to adequately cover the story.
During a discussion about President Joe Biden's age, Kott said that he would "rather have a president who maybe has a stutter once in a while than one who spews conspiracy theory, racist nonsense and has dinner with Nazis." Both Faulkner and conservative radio host Tammy Bruce pushed back, though Kott defended the accusation. Faulkner then complained that Kott was "sadly" resorting to name-calling despite her previous praise that he didn't engage in low-brow tactics.
In a Tuesday analysis for the Post, Bump said that Faulkner and Bruce may have genuinely been unaware that Trump hosted rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West) for dinner along with far-right influencer Nick Fuentes, due to the network's bare-bones coverage of the event. At the time, Trump defended the dinner as "quick and uneventful" and argued that he only invited Ye, while the rapper invited Fuentes and two others without Trump's knowledge.
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Kott describing Fuentes as a "Nazi" is an appropriate term, given his past public statements. The Texas Tribune wrote in October that Fuentes "often praises Adolf Hitler and questions whether the Holocaust happened."
"He has called for a 'holy war' against Jews and compared the 6 million killed by the Nazis to cookies being baked in an oven," the Tribune reported. "He wants the US government under authoritarian, 'Catholic Taliban rule,' and has been vocal about his disdain for women, Muslims, the LGBTQ+ community and others.”
Bump noted Fuentes dining with Trump was a major news story, given his openly racist and anti-Semitic viewpoints. Last year, CBS News — which described Fuentes as a "white supremacist and Holocaust denier" — reported that Fuentes' views were too odious even for the organizers of the far-right Conservative Political Action Conference, which kicked him out of the America Conservative Union's 2023 gathering (CPAC may have since softened its views on having nazi attendees, with NBC News finding that nazis were seen mingling at CPAC 2024 and were not kicked out).
In December of 2022, according to Bump, the Trump/Ye/Fuentes dinner story was "mentioned in 89 segments on CNN and more than twice that number on MSNBC."
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"On Fox, though? It was only mentioned seven times, total," he wrote. "This is very much in keeping with a long-standing pattern at the channel. News that is bad for Trump is muted or limited — including poll numbers from the network’s own pollsters."
To emphasize his point, Bump broke down coverage of similar major news events that were unflattering for the former president, and contrasted how many times Fox's competitors covered that story with the scant mentions the story received on Fox's airwaves. He observed that while CNN and MSNBC carried the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack's primetime hearings, Fox not only refused to broadcast it, but instead allowed then-host Tucker Carlson to air counter-programming downplaying the significance of the siege on the US Capitol.
Bump also analyzed coverage of writer E. Jean Carroll's sexual abuse and defamation lawsuits against the former president, finding that while MSNBC covered them in 4,800 15-second segments and CNN ran 2,000 segments, Fox News ran just 240. This pattern continued in coverage of Trump's alleged mishandling of classified documents — while CNN and MSNBC ran roughly 4,900 segments on the story since August of 2022, Fox gave the story approximately 80% less airtime. However, the network has offered significantly more coverage of stories unflattering to President Joe Biden. Bump reported that Fox has ran approximately 38,000 segments about Biden's son, Hunter, since 2021, including more than 4,200 segments in just one month.
The columnist wrote that the network may counter that it "simply serves as a counterpoint to an organized left-wing narrative, hence its focus is different than CNN and MSNBC." Fox News' longtime motto, "fair and balanced," was officially dropped in 2017, after Trump assumed the presidency.
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