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On March 15, former Vice President Mike Pence dropped quite the bombshell to Martha MacCallum on Fox News: He would not be endorsing his former running mate, Donald Trump, to be president.
Despite getting the scoop, Fox News gave the news just four minutes of coverage, according to Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America. That compares to CNN, which gave the story an hour and 19 minutes, and MSNBC, which spent an hour and 14 minutes covering the story.
“It was their exclusive that they were burying,” Gertz told The New Abnormal co-host Andy Levy. “They made the news and decided that their viewers didn’t need to hear it.”
“I think the reason for that is that Fox News is not, in fact, a conservative network. It does not have an ideologically conservative position on the news. It is a Trumpian propaganda outlet,” Gertz said. “It is an outlet that thinks first and foremost about how the news would impact the political efforts of Donald Trump and the Republicans who support him, and viewed from that angle covering Mike Pence would be a betrayal of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. And so they decided not to mention it virtually at all.”
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“Mike Pence said something that was inconvenient, he said something that could have led some Fox viewers to act against Donald Trump, and so this was a story that they had to keep from their audience,” Gertz said.
In his interview with MacCallum on Fox News, Pence said his decision not to endorse Trump was not just because of what happened on Jan. 6, but because he was “pursuing and articulating an agenda that is at odds with the conservative agenda that we governed on during our four years.”
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
