Two months ahead of the 2024 presidential race, right-wing Fox News and its sister channel Fox Business are trying out a variety of attacks against Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
The Guardian's Margaret Sullivan examines some of those lines of attack in a column published on September 6, arguing that they are falling flat and making Fox News appear "a little desperate."
"Watching Fox News these days is like being at open-mic night at a marginal comedy club," Sullivan observes. "Right-wing pundits, like a lineup of amateur comics, are trying out their new material and hoping it kills. So far, not so much."
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Sullivan notes that Fox News' Jesse Watters, for example, recently said of Walz, "Women love masculinity, and women do not like Tim Walz." But the attack fell flat, according to Sullivan, because Walz is "a famously regular guy" who comes across as "America’s dad."
"The straw-grasping is getting a little desperate these days as Harris and Walz spread their forward-looking message, and as their rivals — the felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance — prove themselves less appealing by the day," the Guardian journalist observes.
According to Media Matters' Matt Gertz, Fox News has yet to recover from its decision to fire Tucker Carlson in 2023. The former Fox News host, before being fired, was the right-wing cable news outlet's top-rated host.
Gertz told The Guardian, "Fox is really feeling the loss of Tucker Carlson right now…. He was very effective at lifting something from the right-wing fever swamp and making it into a coherent message."
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Gertz added that Fox News is "very shook by" Walz's use of "weird" as an attack line against Republicans.
"That's the idea that Trump, Vance and their ilk are deeply strange people way out of the mainstream with their nasty putdowns of 'childless cat ladies' and their outlandish conspiracy theories," Sullivan explains. "It applies all too well to the Fox personalities as well as the politicians they promote. There's time, of course, for Fox to come up with an effective message."
Sullivan adds, "Until something hits, we're going to see a lot of painful tryouts. The alternative, of course, is obvious: just don’t turn it on."
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Margaret Sullivan's full Guardian column is available at this link.
