President Donald Trump is an avid viewer of Fox News and its morning program “Fox & Friends,” which is seen as offering more favorable coverage of the administration than other news outlets. His early morning tweets often reference coverage on the program.
The way each network covered the story – or avoided it – is a sign of how the media landscape has become ever more politicized in the Trump era. That is particularly true of Fox News.
.. Fox News aired 25 minutes of indictment coverage in the first hour after news of the charges broke around 8 a.m. – just as attention would have surged. CNN and MSNBC, in contrast, aired at least an hour of nearly uninterrupted and ad-free coverage.
.. In its morning coverage, Fox played down the indictment news in two ways. First, it cut away in the first few minutes to discuss a dossier, which was partly funded by the Democratic Party, that had leaked during the presidential campaign and included unverified allegations about Mr. Trump. They aired an interview that had already been shown half an hour earlier with the Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway in which she called for an investigation into the Hillary Clinton campaign.
.. Reporting on the indictment continued, with only the occasional ad break, for the next hour on CNN and MSNBC, while Fox reported on North Korea and allegations of sexual misconduct against the actor Kevin Spacey – news that had gained steam after Mr. Spacey issued a widely criticized apology the previous evening.
.. To right-leaning media observers, the coverage by the other networks might seem equally troubling: does the Manafort indictment deserve an hour or more of uninterrupted airtime?