New Yorker reporter says Trump's relationship with Fox News is 'the closest we've ever had to state news'

Kyle Moss

On Monday’s Morning Joe, Jane Mayer, the chief Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, broke down her new report showing just how closely linked President Trump and Fox News are.

“[Fox News] carries his message and it also gives him a message a lot of the time,” Mayer said. “Trump picks up on what he sees on Fox, and I’ve got quotes from people who are very close in to the White House, people who worked in the White House, in and out of Fox, saying what you’ve got is a dysfunctional White House a lot of the time with no normal decision-making process where a lot of the policy-making is the president picking up what’s on Fox.”

Mayer, whose report cites current and former Fox News employees and as well as others close to the White House, also talked about how the president is close with people like Fox News head Rupert Murdoch and Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive who is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff for communications. She also touched on the relationship between Trump and Fox News host Sean Hannity.

“Sean Hannity and Trump speak regularly, almost every night after his show, at least that’s what Sean Hannity has told people,” Mayer said.

Mayer, a longtime investigative journalist, did say that Fox News has some great reporters but that there’s a roadblock of hosts doing opinion-based shows during the major evening and morning hours who offer a “softball platform” for Trump.

“What you’ve got there is, according to a number of critics, the closest we’ve ever had to state news in this country,” Mayer said.

Mayer went on to describe the relationship between the network and the White House as a “feedback loop.”

“We really never had a whole national network like this that is basically, it’s incredibly close with this White House,” she said. “People have described it to me as a wing of the West Wing.”

As far as who holds the most power in the relationship, Mayer wouldn’t say for sure, but did point out just how much money and big ratings Fox News is bringing in.

“What Fox does is it makes money by enraging Americans. That’s how they keep them glued to the television set. And it’s very much the same model that Trump has to keep his base engaged,” Mayer said. “There’s such a kind of a symbiotic relationship, you can hardly tell on any given day which one is in the driver’s seat. What you can say is that it works for both of them, and maybe to the detriment of the rest of us.”

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