It’s an ecosystem in which his false election claims spread unchecked
Fox News didn’t carry Donald Trump’s speech in Arizona this weekend. It’s not hard to figure out why. One could easily have predicted that the former president would say all of the false and potentially lawsuit-spawning things that he ended up saying, and, given that it unfolded on Saturday evening, it’s not as though it was going to yield billions of viewers.
But the speech didn’t need to air on Fox. Before it began, his newly appointed spokeswoman, Liz Harrington, hyped the fact that the speech would instead be carried on the small galaxy of Trump-loyal networks that have emerged in the past few years. For those interested in hearing Trump say the same things he’s been saying for nine months but with a new set of incorrect or misleading details, there was plenty of opportunity to do so.
This is how it works now. Trump has a relatively small footprint in the mainstream media and conversation, including on Fox News. But on the remote media fringes where accuracy dies in obsequiousness, Trump’s message is as loud as it has ever been. Continue reading.