Justin's Political Corner

Former congressman Allen West has found a new home on Fox News, where he has been signed on as a contributor.

“Representative West’s congressional and military experience along with his fearless approach to voicing key issues will provide a valuable point of view to the FOX News lineup,” Fox News Vice President Bill Shine said in a statement. West served in the army before running for Congress in 2010.

h/t: WaPo

CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson is reportedly ”in talks to leave CBS ahead” of her contract in the midst of disagreements with executives over her “wading dangerously close to advocacy” on Benghazi. Attkisson, who has a history of producing shoddy reporting, is getting support from Fox News personalities, with one calling for the conservative network to hire her as an investigative reporter.

The Washington Post noted this week that Attkisson, like Fox News, has been a “persistent voice of news-media skepticism about the government’s story” on Benghazi. ThePost added:

Conservatives see a crusader and truth-teller. Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center calls Attkisson “an outlier” among TV reporters — a hard-nosed investigator of “how our public officials behave and misbehave.” Liberals see a partisan tool. “I think Attkisson has completely given herself over to the right and is very happy to be their champion,” says Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at the liberal Media Matters for America organization.

Politico reported that CBS News “has grown increasingly frustrated with Attkisson’s Benghazi campaign” and executives “see Attkisson wading dangerously close to advocacy on the issue, network sources have told POLITICO. Attkisson can’t get some of her stories on the air, and is thus left feeling marginalized and underutilized. That, in part, is why Attkisson is in talks to leave CBS ahead of contract.” (The Post wrote of the contract situation: “Despite reports of internal conflicts with her superiors, Attkisson says she has no immediate plans to leave CBS. ‘I am currently under contract,’ she says flatly, declining to say when her agreement lapses or what might follow.”)

If Attkisson does land at Fox News, she’d join several other on-air figures who conservatives believed were mistreated by the media. In recent years, Fox News has hired reporter Doug McKelway, Lou Dobbs, Don Imus, and Judy Miller. 

h/t: MMFA

We are proud to announce The Ed Show hosted by Ed Schultz will return to MSNBC starting Saturday, May 11 at 5 p.m. ET.

The Saturday and Sunday show will debut as a one-hour long program expanding to a two-hour format from 5-7 p.m. ET later this summer.

James Holm who is currently the Executive Producer of The Ed Schultz Radio Show will serve as acting Executive Producer of The Ed Show.

Karen Finney’s new program will also debut on May 11 from 4-5 p.m. ET. More information on that program will be announced in the coming days.

H/T: MSNBC

In the annals of Fox News, October 2012 will likely stand out as a shining moment. Buoyed by a wave of Republican optimism about Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, the network seemed tantalizingly close to realizing one of its key ideological goals: ousting President Obama from the White House. Renewed enthusiasm among conservatives was, in turn, triggering record-high ratings for much of the network’s programming and helping it to beat not just rival news competitors MSNBC and CNN during prime time, but every other TV channel on the cable dial. What’s more, the prospect of an ascendant GOP come January meant Fox News might soon return to the era of access and prestige it enjoyed in Washington during the presidency of George W. Bush. The future looked so bright that News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch signed Fox News president Roger Ailes to a lucrative four-year contract extension, even though the 72-year-old Ailes’s existing contract wasn’t due to expire until 2013.

Then November arrived, and with it reality. 

Fox News’s shellshocked election night coverage, punctuated by Karl Rove’s surreal meltdown upon hearing of Obama’s victory in Ohio and, thus, the election, capped off a historic day of reckoning for the network and conservatives alike. Chastened by defeat, Republican politicians and right-wing pundits have subsequently been grappling with the repercussions of the caustic tone and incendiary rhetoric their movement has adopted. This ongoing debate about whether broadening conservatism’s appeal requires new messages or just new messaging has ignored the 800-pound gorilla in the room, however. Noticeably absent from all the right wing’s public self-criticism is any interest in confronting the potent role played by the Republican Party’s single most important messenger, Fox News.

Standing at the epicenter of the network—and any new Republican Party groundswell—is Ailes. A former political operative of President Richard Nixon, Ailes has inextricably intertwined his professional and political pursuits since founding Fox News in 1996. Indeed, the network chief functions as a kind of proxy kingmaker within the party, frequently meeting with Republican politicians to offer strategic advice. He is a regular confidant of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, and at various times, he (or a network emissary of his) has counseled 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Gen. David Petraeus on their potential future. “Ailes,” says former Reagan White House economic adviser Bruce Bartlett, “is quite open about offering his free advice to Republicans…. If you visit New York City, you go see Roger Ailes and kiss his ring. It’s like visiting the Vatican. My guess is that there’s a lot of back-and-forth between Ailes and whoever is at the pinnacle of power in the Republican Party.” 

To keep relying on a shrinking number of elderly, white and male subsets of the public, whether to win elections or win ratings, has become a strategy of diminishing returns, however. “I think that you can’t separate the problem at Fox [News] from the problem that the Republicans are going through,” Bartlett says. He can speak firsthand to this incestuous relationship, as his 2006 book, Impostor—which broke with party orthodoxy over the Bush administration’s deficit spending—quickly made him persona non grata at Fox News, he says. (Fox News did not respond to questions about his comment.) “The Republicans are trying to retool to win. That’s all they care about, and they’re trying to decide, ‘How can we be more pragmatic? How can we shave off the rough edges? How can we get rid of the whack jobs who are embarrassing us, costing us Senate seats? But at the same time, we can’t do this in such a way that it alienates our base.’” Fox News faces a similar dilemma, Bartlett contends: “It’s ‘How do we modernize? How do we attract new audiences without losing the old audience? How do we remain relevant without abandoning our traditions?’” 

These are fundamental questions, and lately Fox News’s 
fundamentals—audience, ratings and public trust—have faltered. A 2010 study by Steve Sternberg found the network’s viewership to be the oldest (with an average age of 65) among an already elderly cable news audience. (CNN’s was 63 and MSNBC’s was 59.) By comparison, lifestyle cable channels Oxygen, Bravo and TLC were among the youngest, with an average viewer age of 42. And with MSNBC’s recent decision to plug 34-year-old rising star Chris Hayes into the coveted 
8 pm slot, the average age of that network’s prime-time hosts will now be 45, while Fox News’s rotation, anchored by 63-year-old Bill O’Reilly, has an average age of 57. 

Having cable news’s oldest average age for both prime-time hosts and audiences represents something of a double-edged sword for Fox in the cutthroat world of cable TV. One advantage is that older audiences are traditionally more loyal, which is why several industry experts say that Fox News is unlikely to be dislodged from its perch atop overall cable TV news ratings anytime soon. This age-loyalty effect redounds to the benefit of Fox News’s best-known prime-time hosts, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, as roughly two-thirds of their viewers are age 50 or older, according to a recent Pew State of the News Media survey. 

But at the same time, there is an undeniable actuarial reality at work—or as Bartlett bluntly puts it, “Their viewership is quite literally dying.” The most lucrative advertising dollars flow to TV shows that attract viewers “in the demo,” short for “demographic”—industry parlance for people ages 25 to 54. By contrast, Fox News’s prime-time commercial breaks are blanketed with pitches for cheap medical devices and insurance companies aimed at retirees and the elderly. Perhaps not surprisingly, the network’s advertising rates have grown at a much more modest pace in recent years, according to the Pew survey. Similarly, the growth of its ad revenues has diminished every year since 2008. 

Because of the relatively older age and smaller size of the cable news audience, viewership tends to be relatively stable, says Columbia University Journalism School professor and former NBC News president Richard Wald. “Its [ratings] move in very small increments.” To understand why viewers come and go, he compares a TV network’s audience to a target with concentric rings. The core audience—those who are loyal to your channel and watch frequently (and, for partisan media outlets, those who are most ideologically compatible)—is the bull’s-eye. Each concentric ring outward represents a segment of the audience that is less likely to watch because of diminished interest or less enthusiastic partisan sympathies. Dramatic ratings shifts can occur, but they tend to be driven by external events, like elections, rather than programming and thus affect all of the networks simultaneously. Most ratings fluctuations are statistical noise, Wald says, resulting from people in the outermost rings tuning in or out based on varying interest. “I would guess that [Fox News’s] numbers could change by 5, 6, 7, 8 percent and not reflect a change in the loyalty of the audience.” 

But here, too, the news does not bode well. Though the network did retain its status as the top-rated cable news network in 2012—its eleventh consecutive year at number one—the steep drop in ratings that its shows have experienced since Election Day has raised eyebrows, precisely because corresponding shows on MSNBC and CNN have not experienced the same precipitous decline. 

Just how much of a drop are we talking about? According to Nielsen data, Fox News’s prime-time monthly audience fell to its lowest level in twelve years in January among the 25-to-54 demographic. Daytime Fox News programming likewise saw its lowest monthly ratings in this age cohort since June 2008. Even the network’s two biggest stars, O’Reilly and Hannity, have not been immune from viewer desertion: Hannity lost close to 50 percent of his pre-election audience in the final weeks of 2012, and O’Reilly more than a quarter. The slide hasn’t stopped in 2013, either. Compared with a year ago, O’Reilly’s February prime-time ratings dropped 
26 percent in the coveted 25-to-54 demographic, his worst performance since July 2008. Hannity’s sank even further, to the lowest point in his show’s history. 

As Wald points out, short-term ratings snapshots can be deceptive. But in the weeks following Obama’s 2009 inauguration, Fox News’s viewership actually surged, averaging 539,000 prime-time demo viewers versus 388,000 and 357,000 for CNN and MSNBC, respectively. This past January, however, Fox could only muster 267,000 average nightly viewers—a 50 percent drop from that 2009 level, and not much more than MSNBC’s 235,000 or CNN’s 200,000. 

So why are all these Fox News viewers tuning out? Some of the decline may be due to a broader cultural trend of people deciding to avoid cable TV news altogether. However, a recent Public Policy Polling survey of news media trustworthiness suggests there’s more going on than public apathy. In February, PPP found a marked drop in Fox News’s credibility. A record-high
46 percent of Americans say they put no trust in the network, a nine-point increase over 2010. What’s more, 39 percent name Fox News as their least-trusted news source, dwarfing all other news channels. (MSNBC came in second, at 14 percent.)

As might be expected, Fox News’s credibility barely budged among liberals and moderates (roughly three-quarters of whom still distrust the network) and very conservative viewers (three-quarters of whom still trust it). However, among those who identified themselves as “somewhat conservative,” the level of trust fell by an eye-opening 27 percentage points during the previous twelve months (from a net plus–47 percent  ”trust” rating in 2012 to plus–20 percent now). Only a bare majority of center-right conservatives surveyed by PPP say that Fox News is trustworthy. 

“The people who are among the moderate-rights are actually the ones tuning out most,” says Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University who specializes in studying partisan psychology. Last May, Cassino conducted a survey that found Fox News’s viewers were less informed about current political issues than those who watched no news at all. In response, the network’s public relations team mocked FDU’s college ranking in Forbes and belittled its student body as “ill-informed.” This kind of ad hominem attack symbolizes the over-the-top, pugilistic messaging style of Ailes, whose no-holds-barred political instincts have dictated the network’s direction since day one. 

Ailes’s foundational idea for Fox News, explains Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple, was to package this bias under the guise of “fair and balanced” news. “It is indeed the artifice of neutrality that makes so much of what they do objectionable, or not just objectionable but noteworthy,” Wemple says. And it is effective, he adds: at a recent Value Voters conference, rock-ribbed conservatives almost involuntarily spouted the network’s motto back at him when he asked them about Fox’s coverage. It’s a maddeningly clever bit of misdirection—the network whose branding is most identified with objectivity and accuracy is, in fact, anything but.

Thanks to its loyal conservative audience and its cozy relationship with the GOP leadership, Fox News has long been insulated from the consequences of its serial misinforming. “If your job is to say the most outrageous thing you possibly can and be rewarded for it, why shouldn’t you?” Cassino points out. “As long as you get ratings, you’re going to keep on doing it.” But the recent erosion in ratings and cracks in the network’s reputation, Cassino says, have created external pressure to make changes inside the network. (Neither Ailes nor anyone else at Fox News would comment when contacted for this story.)

Most notable among these post-election changes involved Fox News ridding itself of contributors Sarah Palin and Dick Morris and replacing them with former Congressman and left-wing gadfly Dennis Kucinich, former GOP Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and RedState.com editor in chief Erick Erickson. To some, this personnel turnover confirmed that Fox News was embracing a more intellectually honest, ideologically diverse worldview. 

But there’s less here than meets the eye. First of all, the impact an individual contributor can have on the network’s overall nature is minimal; permanent hosts like O’Reilly and Hannity drive its day-to-day brand. And in the midst of the 2012 campaign, Ailes locked up O’Reilly and Hannity as well as news host Bret Baier—the Fox News lineup from 7 through 10 pm—all the way to 2016. What’s more, one shouldn’t read too much into the cashiering of Palin and Morris, since, by all accounts, they were terrible at their jobs: the former was criticized internally for being uncooperative with programming suggestions and personally disloyal to Ailes, while the latter was guilty of humiliating the network with his ridiculous election predictions (as well as auctioning off an unauthorized personal tour of Fox News’ studios at a GOP fund-
raiser). “They were only interested in promoting themselves or perhaps promoting an ideology that may not win,” says Bartlett, who singles out Palin’s lack of substance for his harshest criticism. “Totally and professionally, she’s the Lindsay Lohan of cable news.” 

Indeed, Ailes’s new hires are little more than new faces plugged into a well-worn programming strategy. Kucinich fills the slot of house liberal formerly occupied by Alan Colmes, serving as a handy foil for conservatives to shout at or over. The telegenic Brown, a blue-state Republican, endorses textbook anti-woman Republican policies, but does so without giving off an overtly extremist vibe. And die-hard conservative Erickson is there to reassure the Tea Partiers and the netroots—some of whom inexplicably believe that Fox News is drifting left—that they still have a voice on the network. 

Whether these recent, road-to-Damascus conversions are genuine or artificial may not matter much at this point, though. Hannity and many of his Fox News colleagues have invested so much time inciting animosity toward “illegals” and excoriating legislative attempts at “amnesty” that the network has acquired a reputation of harboring anti-Hispanic tendencies. In the aforementioned PPP poll on media trustworthiness, Hispanics ranked Fox News as their least credible news source, with a net four-point negative rating. (Broadcast news networks all enjoyed double-digit positive ratings.) Likewise, a National Hispanic Media Coalition survey from last fall found that Fox News hosts were more likely than those from any other network to negatively stereotype Latinos. It also noted that the network’s audience had the highest percentage of viewers with negative feelings about Hispanics and undocumented immigrants. 

h/t: Reed Richardson at AlterNet, via The Nation

NEW YORK –April 2, 2013 – Karen Finney has been named host of a new MSNBC program to air on weekends from 4-5 p.m. ET. More details about the program, including the launch date, will be announced in the coming weeks.

“Karen’s rich background in both education policy and politics will add a unique point of view to our expanding live weekend programming,” said Phil Griffin, President of MSNBC.

Finney has been an MSNBC political analyst and guest host on the network since 2009.

Finney has more than 20 years of experience in national politics working on four presidential campaigns, the Clinton White House, and Hillary Clinton’s first New York Senate race. She was the first African American spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee. Finney has also worked to improve public education in the public and private sectors.

As spokeswoman and Communications Director for the Democratic National Committee, Finney helped guide the DNC’s communications and media strategy for the successful 2006 Congressional elections and the 2008 presidential campaign. During the Clinton Administration, Karen served as Deputy Press Secretary to then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and as Deputy Director of Presidential Scheduling for President Bill Clinton. She served as Communications Director to Elizabeth Edwards during the 2004 general election.

Finney currently serves on the board of NARAL pro-choice America. She has also served on the advisory board for ONE Vote 2012, the Center for Music National Service and Teach for America, NY. Finney is an alumnus of the French American Foundation’s prestigious “Young Leaders” program aimed at strengthening the transatlantic relationship among up-and-coming leaders. She is also a member of the National Association of Black Journalists. Follow her on twitter @finneyk. 

h/t: NBC Universal’s Press Centre

That is what a number of Tea Party activists are saying and they are organizing a boycott to protest the conservative station’s coverage, especially what they view as the network’s relative silence in investigating the attacks on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

“Particularly after the election, Fox keeps turning to the left,” said Stan Hjerlied, 75, of Fort Collins, Colo., and a participant in the boycott. He pointed to an interview Fox News CEO Roger Ailes gave after the election in which he said that the Republican Party and Fox News need to modernize, especially around immigration. “So we are really losing our only conservative network.”

The three-day boycott lasted Thursday morning through Sunday morning, and is the second time this group of activists have gone Fox-free in an effort to steer the coverage. Organizers say a two-day boycott earlier this month knocked 20 percent off of the network’s regular viewership. (A Daily Beast analysis of the same data showed that the boycott had little effect.)

A spokeswoman for Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.

Starting July 4, Fox News will have some competition as the leading American conservative network in the form of One America News Network. One America is a product of Herring Broadcasting, Inc., which also produces WealthTV, and the Washington Times. Though owned by a San Diego-based broadcaster, One America will be headquartered in Washington, D.C. in the Washington Times building.

One America intends to provide the unbiased 24-hour American and international news coverage for those with “self-described independent, conservative and libertarian values,” who the producers feel are currently underserved. Said President of Herring Broadcasting, Charles Herring when discussing the new network at CPAC, “It is getting really hard to find just the reliable, credible, fact-based news with substance.” He also expressed concern for the libertarian and conservative voices ignored in the current political climate. 

Though Herring does not consider Fox sufficiently conservative — calling it “center-right” — he does not see his network competing with Fox News. Instead, he argues that One America is making up for the fact the Fox is the only conservative option. Furthermore, he alleges that MSNBC is far more liberal than Fox is conservative.

In addition to drawing on the journalistic talent of the Washington Times, One America News will have its own pundits and show hosts. Three headliners have already been announced. It will host Dr. Gina Loudon, a previous contributor to Fox News, The New York Times, and CPAC Radio, and one of the “100 Founding Members” of the Tea Party.  Her show has been endorsed by Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin. She will focus on the psychology behind contemporary politics.

Rick Amato, political commentator and former contributor to the Washington Times, will host a show on top news stories. His previous show, Amato Talk, has received endorsements from Barry Goldwater Jr. and John Solomon. He will focus on the “gap between mainstream America and the political class,” capitalism, grassroots politics, and veterans’ affairs. Graham Ledger, a San Diego native, will provide constitutional analysis of current issues. He has previously won two Emmys and two Golden Microphone awards.

With the rise of a new conservative media team, Republican and Libertarian voters will have the option of a center-right or “true” conservative message, and an emotional debate or a sober reflection on the roots of political belief. Liberal and independent voters will see, then, which perspective prevails. How Fox News responds to the challenge and how this new voice will shape the debate remains to be seen. Come Independence Day, One America could be a game changer. 

h/t: Hannah Ridge at PolicyMic

Chris Hayes will take over the 8 p.m. time slot on MSNBC in the next month, the channel is planning to announce on Thursday morning, hours after the current host of that hour, Ed Schultz, said he was moving from the weekdays to the weekends.

Mr. Hayes, a liberal intellectual who has hosted a well-regarded weekend morning program on MSNBC for the past 18 months, is a protege of Rachel Maddow, the highest-rated host on the channel. He will become the lead-in for her 9 p.m. program, “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

The change is predicated on the belief that MSNBC can win a wider audience with Mr. Hayes than it did with Mr. Schultz, a champion of the working class whose bluster didn’t always pair well with Ms. Maddow and the channel’s other prime time program, “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.” Mr. Hayes, on the other hand, is just as wonky as Ms. Maddow and Mr. O’Donnell, and is a regular contributor to both of their programs.

Mr. Hayes’s promotion was described by people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it had not been officially announced by the channel yet. Once it takes effect, Mr. Hayes, 34, will be the youngest host of a prime-time show on any of the country’s major cable news channels, all of which seek out youthful viewers but tend to have middle-aged hosts and a core audiencemade up of senior citizens. Of Mr. Schultz’s one million viewers last year, for example, only 249,000 were between the ages of 25 and 54.

Ms. Maddow had an average of 339,000 viewers in that key demographic. Usually cable news ratings work the other way — the programs earlier in the evening outperform the programs later in the evening. That’s partly why MSNBC sees an opportunity to grow at 8 p.m.

But taking over that hour is a difficult assignment for Mr. Hayes, given Bill O’Reilly’s commanding grip on the time slot. Mr. O’Reilly, the biggest star on the Fox News Channel, routinely doubled Mr. Schultz’s delivery of 25- to 54-year-old viewers last year, much to the chagrin of Mr. Schultz, who parodied his rival on a regular basis. The ratings imbalance at 8 p.m. helped to obscure the fact that MSNBC has, in prime time overall, crept closer to Fox in that age group.

Mr. Hayes is as eager as anyone at MSNBC to beat Fox, even if the two channels don’t actually fight for the same viewers. His metamorphosis from a writer at The Nation magazine to a broadcaster began several years ago when he was signed up to be a part-time paid contributor to MSNBC. He impressed executives at the channel when he filled in for Ms. Maddow in 2011, and in September of that year he was given his weekend morning show, called “Up with Chris Hayes.”

h/t: NY Times’s MediaCoder blog

Since Glenn Beck left Fox News in 2011 and founded his own web channel, TheBlaze, the former right-wing sensation has been less prevalent in the mainstream political conversation. Still, Beck has cultivated a substantial audience for his subscription-only programming, and is now using that following to pressure cable networks into carrying his channel.

Beck started promoting GetTheBlaze.com on Monday, asking fans to demonstrate to their television provider that there is wider demand for the libertarian channel. If his channel does get picked up by cable television providers, anyone who pays for cable will subsidize Beck’s channel, regardless of whether or not they watch it. As The New York Times explains, TV channels get small per-subscriber fees, whether or not the subscribers ever watch.

Beck argues that carrying TheBlaze would be no different from supposedly ideological cable channels like MSNBC and Al Jazeera America. But since leaving Fox, Beck’s radical libertarianism has gone even further fringe. In the past few months, Beck has promoted multiple conspiracy theories via the channel he is now trying to push on cable subscribers:

1. Cop killer Chris Dorner was supported by liberals. As Los Angeles was turned upside down in the manhunt for Chris Dorner in February, the former police officer who killed 4 people, Beck claimed “the American left” was supporting Chris Dorner. His evidence was a Facebook page with “thousands of likes.”

2. Obama secretly tried to release the “blind sheikh” bomber. Relying on a single anonymous source “close to the Obama administration,” TheBlazeaccused President Obama of plotting to secretly release a 1993 World Trade Center bomber. The conspiracy theory quickly took hold in Tea Party circles, even prompting top House Republicans to parrot the false theory.

3. The Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated the US government. Beck hosted Rep. Michele Backmann (R-MN) to defend her widely denounced anti-Muslim witch hunt. On Beck’s show, Bachmann once again accused Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, of being a Muslim Brotherhood spy, a ludicrous charge vehemently condemned by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Scott Brown (R-MA).

4. The Petraeus scandal was orchestrated by the White House. Like most of the right-wing blogosphere, Beck was obsessed with a purported cover-up of the Benghazi consulate attack. When CIA Director David Petraeus was caught in an affair with his biographer, Beck claimed the White House deliberately orchestrated the scandal in order to discredit the military and distract from the Benghazi attacks. In Beck’s mind, the White House was also behind last year’s Secret Service prostitution scandal, another supposed attempt to undermine trust in law enforcement.

h/t: Aviva Shen at Think Progress Media

Fox News has hired former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain as a contributor. The move comes after the network encouraged Cain to run for president, and vigorously defended him against sexual harassment allegations that eventually sunk his candidacy.

Cain’s hiring follows a similar path that Fox News took with Scott Brown and Sarah Palin, both of whom were lauded by Fox News as political figures and then signed to contributor contracts when they entered public life (Palin has since parted ways with Fox).

Prior to running for president, Cain was a frequent guest on Fox News and was touted as a possible presidential contender because of his business background. During his April 14, 2010, Tea Party-themed program, Sean Hannity called Herman Cain a “rock star” job creator. Hannity then asked his audience, “How many of you would like him to run for president?” which drew loud applause.

Fox News host Neil Cavuto frequently hosted Cain and prodded him to announce that he was running for president on his program. Cain has called Cavuto, who is also a vice president for Fox News, “one of my closest friends,” and said in September 2010 that Cavuto “has been trying to drag” a presidential announcement “out of me for months now.” It was no surprise, then, that Cain announced he was forming a presidential exploratory committee in an “exclusive first” interview on Cavuto’s Fox News program on January 12, 2011.

When allegations of past sexual harassment during Cain’s business career surfaced during the campaign, Fox News rallied to his defense by dismissing the seriousness of the allegations and claiming that Cain was the target of a “smear campaign” because he’s a “black conservative,” and the victim of a “gold digger” and “scam artist.” Here are ten examples of Fox News hosts and contributors defending Cain:

• Then-Fox News contributor Dick Morris said of the allegations: “Well, this is ridiculous. … This woman is in search of money. … This woman has been unemployed for 13 years, and this is apparently payday. … I look forward to her spread in Playboy.“ Morris also called one of the accusers, Sharon Bialek, a “gold digger” and said her accusations were “outlandish.”
• Fox News host Andrea Tantaros attacked Bialek as a “scam artist” with an “illegitimate child.”
• Fox News host Sean Hannity reported on Bialek’s accusations in a segment called, “Anatomy of a Smear Campaign.”
• Sean Hannity interviewed Gloria Allred, the attorney for one of Herman Cain’s alleged sexual harassment victims. Hannity repeatedly questioned why the woman didn’t immediately leave the vehicle after the alleged crime: “Why would one — if that happened, and it was so traumatic, and it was so bad, why would she stay in the car with him?” 
• Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said: “We’re beginning to understand the ubiquitousness of sexual harassment claims and how because they’re happening so often and they’re everywhere, many of them are inherently meaningless, done to safeguard future reputation-damaging things, and you might not be guilty.”
• Fox host Mike Huckabee dismissed the sexual harassment allegations against Cain by comparing his alleged behavior to someone ordering food at Popeyes.  
• Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume claimed that superiors in the workplace are now “at an equal or greater disadvantage” than their employees.
• Fox News host Eric Bolling claimed that the allegations were part of a “systematic taking apart of the right by the left.” He added that his “hunch is, you know, the left-wing nutjobs at Media Matters and all the other lefty blogs” were behind the Cain allegations.
• Fox News contributor Mike Gallagher dismissed the seriousness of the allegations, explaining: “The left hates blacks who are conservative”
• A Fox Nation post described Sharon Bialek as having “a Chicago smell.”

Fox’s press release about Cain’s hiring states that he “notably proposed the ‘9-9-9’ tax plan to solve the nation’s debt problem.” Fox News personalities, especially the hosts of Fox & Friends, presented Cain’s plan as alegitimate proposal. Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy claimed that Cain’s proposal is “attractive” to voters because it’s “so simple to understand.” Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson, meanwhile, proclaimed that “voters love, love, love” the 9-9-9 plan. In reality, as tax expert Edward Kleinbard and others have noted, Cain’s plan would have led to “a huge tax hike for the working poor.”

h/t: MMFA

PPP’s annual poll on TV news finds that there’s only one source more Americans trust than distrust: PBS. 52% of voters say they trust PBS to only 29% who don’t trust it. The other seven outlets we polled on are all distrusted by a plurality of voters.

When it comes to asking Americans which single outlet they trust the most and least out of the ones we polled on, Fox News once again wins both honors. 34% say it’s the one they trust the most, compared to 13% for PBS, 12% for CNN, 11% for ABC, 8% for MSNBC, 6% for CBS, and 5% each for Comedy Central and NBC. Fox News is the choice of 67% of Republicans, while Democrats basically split their allegiances four ways between ABC and CNN, both at 17%, and MSNBC and PBS, both at 16%.

Even more Americans identify Fox News as the outlet they trust the least- 39% give its that designation to 14% for MSNBC, 13% for CNN, 12% for Comedy Central, 5% for ABC and CBS, 3% for NBC, and 1% for PBS. 60% of Democrats give it their lowest marks while Republicans split between MSNBC (24%), CNN (19%), and Comedy Central (14%) on that front.

Full results

H/T: Public Policy Polling