MSNBC network national affairs analyst John Heilemann said Friday on “Deadline” that Fox News was “propaganda” that would not criticize Republican presidents.
Referencing several Fox News host’s text messages, Heilemann said, “We saw this week … Liz Cheney reading the text messages and I know you covered this yesterday, it’s an incredible thing that you have these anchors who tried to lie their way out of their lies this week.”
He continued, “One of the biggest differences is that people who watch this network will remember quite clearly that in August, in the middle of the Afghanistan situation, there was lots of critical coverage of Joe Biden on MSNBC. Liberal voters, liberal viewers, Democratic viewers, yelled at all of us for being too tough on Joe Biden. It is the case that you would never see that when there is a Republican president. That’s what they’ve created, this hegemony on the right, in that echo system where they, Democrats in office, they attack, makeup conspiracy theories, they lie, they poison the soil and soul … but when a Republican is in office, they tow the party line. That is one of the great differences is that you might claim that there’s some ideological tilt, at CNN or MSNBC, but it doesn’t prevent MSNBC or CNN from criticizing Democratic presidents whether it’s Joe Biden, whether it was Barack Obama, whether it was Bill Clinton we have seen it over and over again.”
Heilemann added, “That’s one of the great asymmetries and why the Fox News and all of its spawn, have so much power in the Republican world and conservative world is that they are not just a conservative network, they are a propaganda network. They are state television. They are nothing different than what the old Soviet, what Pravda and state television was in the Soviet Union.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.