Judge for yourself, from what happened when ex-Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) trolled Fox host Brian Kilmeade.
Kilmeade, 60, is no media neophyte, although his journalistic ethics have been questioned due to his involving himself in partisan politics (see Wikipedia article here).
Let’s get around that by saying Kilmeade isn’t a journalist. He’s an entertainer, which is true of all Fox hosts. Kilmeade has co-hosted Fox’s show “Fox & Friends” for 22 years, so he shouldn’t be a sucker for trolls.
Good, a notorious rightwing firebrand, and a continual pain in the butt to Speaker Mike Johnson, narrowly lost his 2024 primary after Trump endorsed his Republican opponent, so he’s no longer in Congress.
Johnson was re-elected speaker on Friday, January 3, 2025, with no votes to spare (see story here). In the days preceding the speaker election, the media speculated whether he had enough votes. (He didn’t until Trump intervened with two holdouts during Friday’s voting.)
Prior to the voting, Good tweeted, “I will NOT be voting for Mike Johnson for Speaker todat” (sic). Kilmeade bit. Live on the air, he blurted, “Well, I got bad news. Congressman Bob Good just tweeted out, he will not be voting for Mike Johnson.”
When Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) corrected him, Kilmeade asked his producer, “Could we check that?” Jordan then walked him through the fact Good isn’t voting in the speaker election because he’s not in Congress anymore.
Kilmeade responded, “Alright, good point. He’s not there anymore, so I shouldn’t have brought that up. My bad. But he put that out. Evidently.” In other words, he blamed being trolled on the troll. Like kids do. See story here.
That’s a lame way to defend his ignorance. It’s his job to know that Good isn’t in Congress and was trolling his “X” (aka Twitter) audience, before saying something stupid to Fox’s audience of millions of viewers. That’s what he gets paid big bucks for. Supposedly.
But actually not. Fox pays him a reported $4 million a year not to report or educate Fox viewers, but to entertain them. Factual accuracy isn’t part of Fox’s business model. Feeding their audience what they want to hear is. Fox isn’t a news organization, it’s entertainment.
The upshot is that Fox’s audience listens to people who don’t know what they’re talking about. As a result they don’t know what they’re talking about. This is a small incident, but not an isolated one, and it shows that Fox hosts are careless with facts, are gullible, and easily trolled even by their political allies.
Is listening to them what you want to invest your time in? Not me.