Trump thinks Fox News isn’t doing enough to promote his presidency

President Donald Trump took his complaints about Fox News, his biggest bastion of support on television, to a new level Wednesday, claiming that the network “isn’t working for us anymore.”

His tweets made explicit Trump’s long-held belief that Fox belongs to him and his supporters. Despite daily cheerleading from “Fox & Friends” in the morning all the way until “The Ingraham Angle” at night, Trump has frequently claimed that the network is not sufficiently loyal to him.

“We have to start looking for a new News Outlet,” he tweeted on Wednesday, inadvertently lending credence to critics’ claims that Fox is akin to state-run TV.

Fox spokespeople declined to comment on the president’s attacks.

Brit Hume, the network’s senior political analyst, replied to Trump and said “Fox News isn’t supposed to work for you.”

The president has lodged complaints about Fox more than a dozen times this year, in what appears to be an intensifying pressure campaign to keep the network “in line,” so to speak.

He typically hits the tweet button after watching stories on the network’s daytime newscasts, which are anchored by journalists such as Shep Smith, Bret Baier, Sandra Smith and Bill Hemmer.

While some of the news hours have a rightward bent, the anchors generally don’t display the pro-Trump sycophancy that’s a signature feature of Fox’s opinion programs.

On Wednesday, Trump said he had just watched Fox “heavily promoting the Democrats” during Sandra Smith’s interview of DNC communications director Xochitl Hinojosa.

Trump said Hinojosa was “spewing out whatever she wanted with zero pushback by anchor,” which, ironically, is what Trump often does during interviews with his Fox friends such as Sean Hannity, who has in his time off-air also served as an unofficial adviser to the president.

Trump then listed off some of his previous grievances about Fox, including the existence of Shep Smith’s 3 p.m. newscast and the presence of liberal commentators Donna Brazile and Juan Williams.

He called Fox “HOPELESS & CLUELESS” and said “they should go all the way LEFT and I will still find a way to Win – That’s what I do, Win. Too Bad! I don’t want to Win for myself, I only want to Win for the people. The New @FoxNews is letting millions of GREAT people down! We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn’t working for us anymore!”

Just one day ago, Trump tweeted out promotion and praise for one of Fox’s pro-Trump hosts, Jeanine Pirro, who released another Democrat-bashing book on Tuesday.

“Out today, go get it!” Trump said shortly after Pirro appeared on Fox to sell the book.

The-CNN-Wire
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