Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush reportedly told South Carolinians that Fox News annoys him.
Bush, a potential 2016 establishment Republican presidential candidate who has already come under fire for his support of amnesty legislation, Common Core, and potential tax increases, reportedly made his remarks in the first-in-the-South primary state on Thursday. He was in South Carolina to meet with activists and campaign for Republican Governor Nikki Haley.
According to a CNN report, “Bush expressed annoyance with the polarizing fights and constant negativity of the political news media–he singled out Fox News, saying he usually watches the channel for a few minutes a day before switching over to SportsCenter–and said he is ‘frustrated’ by the toxic climate in Washington.”
Unlike Bush, conservatives get their news from Fox News. An extensive Pew Research study found that, “when it comes to choosing a media source for political news, conservatives orient strongly around Fox News. Nearly half of consistent conservatives (47%) name it as their main source for government and political news, as do almost a third (31%) of those with mostly conservative views. No other sources come close.”
Bush father, George H.W. Bush, would have also never won Ronald Reagan’s third term as president had it not been for Roger Ailes, the pioneering media executive who founded Fox News and revolutionized the cable news landscape by reporting stories that the elite mainstream media ignored and “flyover country” found important. As Breitbart News has noted, Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, Jim Pinkerton and others helped Jeb Bush’s establishment father win over Reagan Democrats in 1988 in a way that Mitt Romney’s advisers could not in 2012. Those voters abandoned Bush four years later when he reneged on his “no new taxes” pledge to the American people.