Fox News screaming desperately into wind as Trump loses grip

Fox News screaming desperately into wind as Trump loses grip Fox News has always served as a purveyor of Republican war propaganda, but its coverage of the Iran conflict has been particularly aggressive, and in many ways unmoored from reality, giving their viewers a more than skewed vision of what President Donald Trump can — and cannot — accomplish in Iran today. It appears that it has been an editorial decision at Fox to convince their audience (whose median age (pewresearch.org) is 55) that the Iranians cannot be negotiated with nor trusted and that war was — and still is — the only option. Its range of hosts and guests continue to insist that Trump’s military campaign has been a rousing success. By all independent, observable accounts (responsiblestatecraft.org › trump ends war critics) it has not.Of course that wouldn’t comport with the narrative that Fox had generated in the lead-up to the war.Mark Levin, one of Trump’s favorite hosts on the channel, has been a leading champion of this narrative. On his program, “Life, Liberty & Levin,” Levin has gone all-in on regime change, saying (x.com) in the weeks before the conflict that “if we don’t act, and by that I mean not diplomacy, but decisively, quickly, and overwhelmingly with our military against the top of the regime,” then Iran will certainly, according to Levin, “build nuclear weapons, as North Korea has.” Levin also warned his audience that Iran “will not hesitate to launch ICBMs with nuclear warheads against our cities.”Trump made it a point to post these kinds of arguments from Levin and others on Truth Social (truthsocial.com), prepping the Fox News audience, and the American people more broadly, for war.After the conflict began, longtime host Laura Ingraham reframed the conflict using a classic neoconservative spin. “The real debate here… is not between the interventionists and the isolationists, or even between Trump and some elements of his base,” Ingraham said, “The real conflict here is between those who believe America is good, and those who believe fundamentally America is corrupt and evil.” This of course is a warmed-over strawman seeking to chill any debate over the war, and encouraging the Fox audience to label anyone who opposes Trump’s actions as “anti-American.”As military force failed to meet Trump’s vacillating objectives, Fox’s hosts remained unfazed. Confident as ever, Jesse Watters stated (x.com) on March 25 that the Iranians were “running out of time and firepower.” In an effort to convince his audience of imminent regime collapse, Watters also said that, “every day that our bombers fly unchallenged, the regime loses power.”Of course time is not on our side. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is dangerously low, (responsiblestatecraft.org › trump oil reserves) and the same goes for U.S. stockpiles of defensive missile systems (cnn.com › us military missile stockpile). Meanwhile, the first and most intense stage of fighting did little to deplete Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones (washingtonpost.com › cia intelligence iran trump blockade missiles).Touted as Fox’s wisest military mind, Gen. Jack Keane is a key fixture of the network's war coverage. He, like Levin, says that the Iranians are too irrational for diplomacy. In a recent appearance (youtu.be › FvbvPNb3M M) on “Life, Liberty & Levin,” Gen. Keane said, “We have said on this show multiple times, you cannot trust the Iranians. They will lie and cheat. And even if they make a deal… they will not comply with it.”The network creates an echo chamber by bringing on guests to repeat and validate the hawkish positions of the hosts. Maria