Monday, October 12, 2020

Media Matters: An Analysis Of Trump's Fox Live-Tweeting Over The Past two Years

STUDY: Two Years Of Trump's Fox Live-Tweeting Obsession, By The Numbers
Trump live-tweeted Fox 1,146 times from September 2018 through August 2020 -- 7.5% of his total tweets
Matt Gertz, Media Matters, October 9, 2020
President Donald Trump tweeted in response to Fox News or Fox Business programs he was watching at least 1,146 times over the two years from September 2018 through August 2020 -- 7.5% of his total tweets during that period -- according to a Media Matters review.
He live-tweeted 42 different Fox programs, most frequently responding to the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends, which he tweeted about at least 355 times.

For years, I have been tracking Trump's habit of watching Fox programming -- often on delay using a DVR -- and tweeting out often belligerent or self-aggrandizing responses to what he sees on his television, described here as "live-tweeting." On the first day of this study, for example, Trump tweeted a quote from a pro-Trump commentator accusing the FBI and CIA of corruption that had aired a few hours earlier on Fox & Friends Weekend, while on the last day he praised his son Donald Trump's Jr.'s book after seeing him promote it in an interview on Sean Hannity's Fox show.

This study provides a comprehensive review of Trump's live tweets over the last two years, and it expands upon reports I wrote on his 2019 live tweets and those from the first six months of this year. For this study, I reviewed all of the Trump tweets I had previously identified as the result of the president live-tweeting his television, the overwhelming majority of which were in response to the Fox channels. I logged the networks and shows to which the tweets responded, as well as the topics and targets Trump discussed and the personalities he quoted.

Gertz, in 2019:

[T]he data provides a window into how Trump consumes news, revealing a president who is immersed in and fueled by Fox's often conspiratorial and disinformation-laced programming, who prefers the rantings of its hosts to expert analysis . . .

They show Trump trying to fend off a host of scandals by catapulting the talking points of his televised allies into the mainstream; distracted in crucial moments by the rancor and propaganda coming from his television; and so driven by television news programming that he seems almost physically unable to deprive himself of it.

Adapted from Brian Stelter's Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth:

"Everything I know about the Constitution, I learned from you on 'Fox & Friends,'" President Donald Trump once told Judge Andrew Napolitano.

A former New Jersey Superior Court judge who became the top on-air legal expert at Fox News, Napolitano was at once flattered and horrified.

In West Wing meetings in 2017 and 2018, the Fox-addicted president brought up Napolitano's TV analysis with his actual lawyers.

A former Fox News producer confided that Trump's constant phone calls to various Fox personalities are not meant to tell Fox to report certain things a certain way. They are so Trump can find out what he should say at his media briefings and rallies.

4 comments:

Paul Hickman said...

Dump has played Golf, tweeted Nonsense & watched 210 000 people die ......

What a Total Bogroll

The fact that seemingly 40% of Americans cannot understand "simple facts" is truly a crisis in Education

In any other era, only 6 people & a dog would vote for him !

allan said...

No dog is that stupid.

Paul Hickman said...

True !

Dogs for Sense ......

Dogs for Biden !

allan said...

Our dogs are socialists. They would never support Biden!