https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1057004782311927808
Of all the diseases available you still fall back on leprosy, smallpox and tuberculosis? Those were the things you had to fear from immigrants like a century ago, not today when most of our population is borderline invincible against them.
I saw a segment earlier where the host asked them what the potential ENDGAME of the KARAVAN is, and the expert said "that's the thing that frightens our national security community, we don't know."
Shep Smith may as well be on a different channel entirely given how wildly different the rest of the Fox is from him.
Shep's deal gives him the freedom of a Hannity or Chris Wallace, except unlike Hannity, he tends to use it for good. Shep prefers doing lots of news stories quickly on his shows rather than just being a pundit fest so it offers up some diversity to the programming.
I think Bret Baier kinda leans like Chris Wallace into the old format of the news program where you do news, then you have a panel, but Bret's also taken over Shep's position on their long coverages of stuff so the panels are often there for him to just toss to in order to fill time.
There was an interesting article back when Ailes got kicked out about how he actually envisioned Fox as providing all these different types of shows, even if they all leaned conservative generally, and that the main reason Tucker/Hannity/the late O'Reilly/etc. were in primetime was simply because of their ratings. People liked the Shep and Bret more news focus at the times when people grew up when network news was on, and that a good chunk of the audience leaves to go watch regular TV shows, while a new group comes in to watch the Hannity Bloc and watches the whole thing even as it covers the same two stories over and over and over for three or four hours.
Back when
Red Eye was in its prime, they openly talked on the internet about lots of the ways Fox measures all their ratings and stuff, and they can do metrics down to the individual segment. (That was partly why
Red Eye slowly lost guests like GWAR or interviews or comedic bits and many "unknown" comedians in order to bring on more talking heads or worse people like Steven Crowder...and then started to shift into more of a slightly more laid back version of
The Five and their "liberal" devils advocate was fired.)
Lots of people talk about Trump watching Fox endlessly, but you can tell from what he says or tweets that he doesn't truly engage with it and it's background noise for most of his day*. His focus is Fox and Friends in the morning which starts off his tweetstorms, and then Lou Dobbs/Hannity in the evening before he goes to bed.
*This has actually been part of standard White House policy since the first Bush Administration, they were increasingly learning things about international events quicker from CNN than actual officials, etc. So there was a policy implemented to have CNN on, often muted, just to see if they missed anything. I imagine that as CNN alternatives arose they might have allowed for Fox in the W. Admin or al Jazeera in the Obama Admin. Trump infamously ordered Fox to be on instead of CNN on Air Force One, but for most purposes like breaking news during the daytime all three channels are generally the same. Personally I would have ordered RT along with Info Wars to be on to get unbiased facts.
An equivalent today would probably be putting a few people to just have a twitter feed up to see if anything starts trending like during the Arab Spring or etc.
