What in the hell is going on at Fox News? – On Monday, Fox News came out with yet another poll whose findings are, to say the least, difficult to explain. The poll, conducted by Braun Research out of Princeton, NJ, finds that voters favor the impeachment and removal of President Donald Trump by a margin of 50% to 46%. The poll’s sample of “1000 registered voters” was conducted from December 8 through December 11, basically a week ago.
Four other current polls, by Qunnipiac, CNN, NPR/PBS/Marist and USA Today/Suffolk – all notoriously slanted in favor of Democrats – all find that equation reversed, with voters opposing impeachment and removal by margins ranging from 3% to 6%. Other than NPR/PBS/Marist, all were conducted more recently than the Fox News poll, which may help to explain things. Why Fox waited five days after its poll was completed before reporting on it is a mystery.
But here’s the deal: This conduct and reporting of clear outlier polls by Fox News has now become a very clear and consistent pattern. Coincidentally or not, that pattern began to emerge in 2018 right around the time that former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was named to a seat on Fox’s board of directors. Probably just a coincidence, but damn, that was also around the time we began to see a decidedly anti-Trump slant emerge on Fox’s daytime “news” programs outside of the Shep Smith hour, which had always been a leftist love-fest.
Coincidence or not, it’s been an interesting pattern to observe. True, Fox did part ways with the insipid Mr. Smith recently, but nobody believes that was due to any concern within management about Smith’s leftist slant, which had been a consistent feature of the channel’s programming throughout the 21st century. But the anti-Trump bias across the remainder of the channel’s daytime programming remains ingrained, and growing.
Back to this latest poll, its’ sample breakdown is very odd, consisting of 46% Democrats, 41% Republicans and just 12% independents. Why Braun would choose to over-sample both Ds and Rs so significantly is hard to explain, since every estimate with any validity says that well over 30% of the public identifies as independents. But that breakdown has to be intentional.