New Yorker reporter says a lot of Trump’s policy-making is him ‘picking up what’s on Fox’

Yahoo Entertainment
Updated

On Monday’s Morning Joe, the chief Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, Jane Mayer, broke down her new article showing just how closely linked President Trump and Fox News are.“[Fox News] carries his message and it also gives his 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 all 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 article sites current and former Fox News employees and as well as others close to the White House, also talked about how close the president is with people like Fox News head Rupert Murdoch and Bill Shine, a former Fox News exec. 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 decorated and 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 major evening and morning hours who offer a “soft ball 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. 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.”Watch what Bernie Sanders had to say about whether or not he will seek advice from Hillary Clinton:

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