April 27, 2018

All the Times This Week Fox News Used Kanye’s Tweets to Push its Pro-Trump Agenda

“Turning Hollywood and the liberal music world upside down!”

The first segment of any cable news hour is called the “A block.” This week, Fox News turned it into the “Kanye block.”

As you know—and may not want to know—by now, Kanye West tweeted his support for the president earlier this week, along with a photo of his Trump–signed  “Make America Great Again” cap, and  some other bizarre stuff about “dragon energy.” 

https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/989227154993963009

In Foxland, Kanye’s tweets were in such obvious contravention of mainstream Liberal Thought, it was all the fuel the giddy folks over there needed for segment after segment about an ensuing “liberal melt-down” and how “monolithic” leftist politics has become and oh-how terrible that was… and… and… but this, this was hopeful.

Kanye’s tweets were nothing less than a “cultural, tectonic shift,” said Fox News presenter Jesse Watters. “A celebration!”

It’s “driving liberals on social media totally insane tonight!” an excited Sean Hannity said at the top of his show on Wednesday.

To fully understand the gloating, we offer you a primer on cardinal truths of the Fox News universe:

  1. Liberals enforce Orwellian control over thought; deviance is punished by expulsion.
  2. The biggest enforcers are rich, coastal Hollywood-types, the mainstream media, and campus student groups; Black Lives Matter and Antifa are militant wings.
  3. Black people are among the victims who suffer the most from this lack of Thought Diversity.
  4. Trump is not racist; saying that is racist.

So, Kanye, a rich black rapper, tweeting about how much he loves Trump? What a fizzy cocktail of race and schadenfreude! 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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