Donald Trump is known to watch a lot of television and for many hours every day: everyone who worked with him said it, and some time ago himself he told during a press conference what he had done the day before. “I looked at Liz McDonald, she’s great. I watched Fox Business. In the evening I watched Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Tucker, Laura. I looked this morning Fox and Friends“. Several times Trump interacts live with the programs he watches, writing tweets of criticism or approval. The time Trump spends watching TV – even seven hours a day – it is indicated on its official agenda come “Executive Time”.
Likewise, it is well known that Trump’s favorite TV by far is Fox News, and how the two influence each other. This story is the subject of the book Hoax, published in Italy by NR Edizioni and written by CNN journalist Brian Stelter, who edited a followed column of media analysis and criticism on the popular US television network. The book tells the very close relationship of mutual dependence between Trump and Fox News, and the way in which the television channel sets the political agenda for the president of the United States. A few days ago Stelter was interviewed by Francesco Costa, deputy editor of the Post and an expert on American affairs.
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Trump allowed himself more “Executive Time” and watched more TV over the years. He’d outfitted his upstairs residence with several televisions and digital recorders, and lingered up there in the morning, out of sight of the potential moles working for him downstairs. He usually watched programs like Fox & Friends with a bit of a delay, which allowed him to skip commercials by running forward. He zapped from Fox Business to Newsmax to free-to-air broadcasters. Despite his declared hatred of CNN and MSNBC, he kept a close eye on those channels as well. I know because my guests on Reliable Sources sometimes they were contacted by the president after saying things in support of him during my program. One of the biggest lies, measured in terms of distance from the truth, he ever told was: “I don’t watch much television.” He watched so much that sometimes, as an avid fan he was, he would fall asleep with Fox still on.
Recorders were a key part of his television equipment. The president called TiVo “one of the greatest inventions of all time”, and said TV was “practically useless without TiVo.” But TiVo, which was invented in 1999, was just the trademark of a generic concept, like people photocopying a sheet with a different brand of copier (the pun in the original is with “Xeroxed”, from the brand name Xerox, which is used as a synonym for photocopying in English). Trump claimed to have a “Super TiVo” at the White House, but he actually had the DirecTV Genie HD DVR, a whole-home system that recorded multiple channels at the same time and allowed users to watch those recordings from any screen in the home. . A truly extraordinary technology for a couch potato. With Genie, he could zap through Fox programming hours at his residence, hit pause, go downstairs to the Oval Office, and pick up where he left off. When he moved in, he had a sixty-inch TV installed above a fireplace in his private dining room in the West Wing, a short walk from the Oval Office. That’s where he usually caught up on the cable news during the working day before retiring upstairs in the evening. Obama only kept a small TV in the dining room, usually tuned to ESPN, as Trump himself told visitors by mocking his predecessor’s screen size and pointing to his replacement.
There were also other TVs scattered around the West Wing, many of them set to one of the four screens showing four different channels simultaneously. The most popular version was “The Four Boxes of Cable TV,” with Fox News, Fox Business, MSNBC and CNN. Another four-screen showed Washington television stations. A third variation included C-SPAN, CNBC and Bloomberg. As you may have guessed by now, Trump was particularly interested in the version with the four cable TVs.
He also received dossiers full of news clips so that he could see who was talking about him, and what the superimposed writing said, in the rare hours he wasn’t in front of the TV. The dossiers also included transcripts of some television segments and, according to Vice, “sometimes just photos of Trump on TV with a powerful air.”
Some Time reporters who had spent time watching TV with Trump in 2017 reported that he watched the screen “like a coach covering the match tape, studying opponents, and plotting moves for the next week.” Sometimes it concerned his speeches and his interviews; at other times, its democratic rivals. DirecTV Genie was the key to everything.
Fox’s joke was that Trump watched more of the broadcaster’s programs than management did. Now that Hope Hicks was out of the White House and working at Fox Corp, she knew there was some truth. But he hated the pounding of stories about the president glued to Fox News. He thought they made him look modest and ill-informed.
The problem, however, was that those stories were true.
White House Social Media Director Dan Scavino was tasked with making sure Trump’s orbit saw Trump’s favorite segments of Fox. He tweeted so many videos from the broadcaster’s programs that his Twitter account sometimes resembled the network’s official account.
“Fox,” a White House aide told me referring to the materials management system that sites use to publish content, “it’s not just a sounding board. We see it as a content management system on steroids ”. He described the broadcaster as the ultimate CMS – a content creation mechanism that past presidents would kill to have. It’s about “getting clips out and making sure influencers shoot them where millions of people can consume them.” It means “making friendly news sites write articles upon articles; give the party ammunition for their opposition research; ensure that campaigns can mention Breitbart or the Daily Caller in TV commercials and mail ads. And all this comes from Fox ”.
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