Fox News officially announced Tuesday that it has hired former Trump spokesman Kayleigh McEnany as a collaborator.
“It’s a great pleasure today to welcome Kayleigh Mcenany to the Fox family,” anchor Harris Faulkner said Tuesday morning after wrapping up a live interview with Trump’s former flack. “In the future we’ll see a lot more of her.”
Fox News did not respond when asked for comment.
The addition of a well-known and frequent liar to the Fox News list triggered some alarms within a newsroom that has been “debugged” in recent months in favor of right-wing opinion programming and content. aimed at satisfying a bold MAGA audience.
“It is truly disgusting to have fired hardworking journalists who cared about the facts and news just to turn around and hire a mini-Goebbels the relentless lies of the White House helped incite the insurrection of our democracy that killed five people, including a police officer, “Fox Daily told The Daily Beast.” Post-Trump Fox is fast becoming a very scary place and quite dangerous for our democracy. It is no longer conservative news. They have plunged into an alternative reality where extremist propaganda is the only resource on the menu. “
The official announcement came weeks after it was reported that McEnany had been in talks to join Fox News immediately after leaving the Trump administration.
In his latest public funding disclosure report, filed in late January, McEnany said he had signed a “labor agreement with Fox News.” According to the network chain at the time, however, “an agreement was negotiated but paused,” adding that they would be open to continuing to hire it because Fox “does not tolerate canceling the culture.”
“It’s annoying,” a current Fox News member lamented in The Daily Beast. “There are so many good people out of work now and I’m sure they’ll get a huge contract.” But hiring makes sense, this employee said, because “Sarah Sanders has just left to run for governor of Arkansas and our audience loves Kayleigh.”
Another editor said about hiring McEnany: “It bothers me that it’s basically a slap in the face to working journalists who value the news and the real facts. But I’m not surprised either because they have shown that they don’t care about the facts and the real news. “
A third Fox News employee criticized the hiring and said, “There is no longer objectivity in this business. It’s a self-employed company.” McEnany clearly appeals to Fox, this staff member said, due of “name recognition, notoriety, the obvious willingness to say whatever your employer wants. Spectators are idiots. “
McEnany has long been an event on Fox News. He began his media career working on Mike Huckabee’s Fox program and made regular appearances on the nightly program. Red eye before becoming a Trump deficiency expert in favor of Trump on CNN and finally joining his White House team.
Immediately after Trump’s decisive election loss to President Joe Biden, McEnany was an almost nightly presence on the first-hour program of the most valued host, Sean Hannity, waving infamous bouquets of papers in an effort to promote The president’s “big lie” that the election was “stolen” because of widespread electoral fraud that did not exist. She, at one point, said, for example, that Trump had only “one in a billion chances” of losing against Biden, repeating a discredited and utterly false argument from the former president’s legal team.
Trump Flack’s hiring comes amid Fox’s attempt to recapture MAGA viewers who left the network after Trump’s election loss. After the network’s decision-making service made an early (and correct) screening of Election Night that Biden won in Arizona, disgruntled Trump fans left the channel for other more Trump-dedicated outlets like Newsmax. (Fox scores have recovered a bit in recent weeks, and the network has recently gained in prime time).
After the rating difficulties, which finished third on the network for the first time in 20 years, Fox renewed its daytime training and expanded its right-wing opinion programming, adding new conservative opinion programs. at 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. it has also pushed its so-called “hard news” programs to focus its coverage on opinion hosts ’comments and conservative themes of the time on the cultural war.
“The channel is trying not to lose even more viewers,” one Fox News employee noted. “They’re understanding how the vision they built and nurtured over the last four years can be maintained, with Trump at the helm.
“It has been wanted to keep viewers going and they will do anything to do that, including blatant lying and selling their souls and their integrity to the devil.”
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Diana Falzone was a digital and camera reporter for FoxNews.com from 2012 to 2018. In May 2017 she filed a lawsuit against the network for gender discrimination and disability and established and left the company in March 2018 .