The following article by Tina Nguyen was posted on the Vanity Fair website February 2, 2018:
Sean Hannity’s first act as “senior counselor to the president” may have been a grave error.
The feedback loop between Fox News and Donald Trump is no secret: the president regularly starts his mornings with several hours of tweets responding to Fox & Friends, and ends his days with online musings about the latest talking points in primetime. In the span of a year, Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity have become, unexpectedly, some of the most powerful people on the planet. Behind the scenes, however, the relationship is even more symbiotic. As my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported last month, Trump has lately evolved into a sort of de facto head of programming at Fox, calling hosts to praise their analysis or to suggest new messaging. “What he usually does is he’ll call after a show and say, ‘I really enjoyed that,’” one former Fox anchor said. “The highest compliment is, ‘I really learned something.’ Then you know he got a new policy idea.” Continue reading “The Trump-Fox News Feedback Loop is Now Complete”