• By Marc Sandalow | Examiner columnist
• Apr 13, 2025 (SFExaminer.com)

In Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Big Daddy says, “There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity. You can smell it. It smells like death.”

Even by today’s loose standards for truthfulness, Fox News sank to a new low this month trying to defend President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again trade war.

First, the network’s anchors told viewers that high tariffs were good, and that tumbling stock markets were nothing to worry about. They called Trump courageous when he vowed on social media that “MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE.”

Then, when Trump changed policies, pausing tariffs for 90 days (with the exception of China), they called him a genius and rejoiced in the markets’ partial recovery.

Few readers of this column are likely to be Fox News devotees or take it terribly seriously. Fox News viewers are overwhelmingly conservative and white, the combination of which doesn’t exactly describe the typical San Franciscan.

But sometimes the stench of lies becomes so odious and the groveling to curry favor with patrons so rancid, that it needs to be called out, lest we sink deeper into a world where news is nothing more than entertainment aimed at making consumers feel virtuous about their beliefs, whether or not they have any basis in fact.

Consider how multiple Fox personalities reacted to the stock market’s largest dive since COVID-19, a swoon which wiped out trillions in global wealth before stocks rebounded.

“Tomorrow when you look at the Dow, it might not feel so liberating. But neither did the day after D-Day. Eventually we won,” Fox News Primetime host Jesse Watters said (via a transcription from Media Matters For America, a left-leaning media watchdog).

“I don’t really care about my 401(k) today. You know why? I believe in this man,” said Jeanine Pirro, co-cost of “The Five,” referring to her faith in the president.

“What he’s doing is courageous,” said Laura Ingraham, host of “The Ingraham Angle.” “The current market gyrations are going to be short-lived.”

But as wise as the tariffs were, Trump’s decision to backtrack just 10 hours after they took effect, in their eyes was even wiser.

“Genius,” Ingraham declared.

Nearly three years earlier, when Joe Biden was in office, Ingraham said “we are all suffering for the incompetence,” complaining that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped 746 points over the course of his presidency.

Ingraham left unsaid last week the Dow closed Friday down nearly 3,300 points from the end of Trump’s first day in office.

The Fox News double standard even applies to golf. Trump hitting the links in the weekend after introducing tariffs and markets plunged was presented on Fox News as a sign of calm, if not defiance.

Playing golf “is not a middle finger to middle America — that’s a middle finger to all those foreign countries who are trying to get on the phone and negotiate these tariffs down.” Watters said on “The Five.” In a moment of self-awareness, Watters joked that had President Biden been golfing during a crisis like this, “I’m sure I wouldn’t have said a word.”

Fox News is to journalism what Funyuns are to food — a substance that resembles nourishment carefully manipulated to keep customers coming back for more.

In his astute book “Broken News, Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back,” former Fox News Political Editor Chris Stirewalt writes that Fox is not an arm of — and does not take orders from — the Republican Party.

Instead, he writes, Fox News has a business model aimed at pleasing conservative viewers. It’s a subtle but important distinction.

Fox News is not the same as state-run television, as in Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China. The network is motivated to offer viewers what they want because a large audience means selling more advertisments.

The makers of Funyuns — or Cheez-Its or Jalapeno Popper Cheese Curls — aren’t aiming to push junk on consumers any more than they are trying to nourish them. They simply want customers to come back for more.

Journalism, at its best, is different. Appealing to consumers is inevitable in any business driven by markets. But when a network is focused on feeding viewers news they want, rather than what’s real, it is, in the words of one well-known observer, fake.

Marc Sandalow is a senior faculty member at the University of California’s Washington Program. He has been writing about California politics from Washington, D.C., for over 30 years.