Fox News has always been a partisan news network. But people are increasingly questioning whether it has crossed a line in the Trump era and become an outright propaganda operation.

A recent piece by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer is the latest to pose this question. Back in 2017, the New Republic’s Alex Shephard floated a similar argument, writing that “Donald Trump is treating Fox News like state TV.”

Even Bret Baier, a lead anchor at Fox News, addressed the claims in a 2018 interview with the New Yorker, saying it “pains” him to hear that the cable news channel has become “state TV” for the Trump administration.

There’s plenty of evidence to support the argument. Trump constantly watches Fox News, tweets out claims he hears on the network, reportedly speaks regularly with Sean Hannity, and gives the majority of his interviews to Fox News. World leaders as well as members of Congress quickly learned that one of the best ways to communicate a message to Trump is to say it on Fox News.

To top it off, Trump’s previous director of communications and deputy chief of staff, Bill Shine, is the former co-president of Fox News. Shine’s presence at the White House [Shine has recently departed the White House], along with Trump’s ties to on-air personalities like Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Jeanine Pirro, all but cemented the unofficial relationship between Trump and the right-wing news network.

None of this is normal. Administrations and politicians have always sought to use the media to their advantage, of course, but this feels different. It certainly seems like Fox News has essentially become state TV. So how concerned should the average American be?

To get some answers, I reached out to Tom Rosenstiel, a media scholar and executive director at the American Press Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting sustainable journalism. Rosenstiel studies the history of media in America and has written a book on the ethics of journalism in the digital age.

We discussed the evolution of Fox News, whether there’s any precedent for this in American history, and if he thinks other, more liberal cable news outlets like CNN and MSNBC are helping to normalize the model set by Fox.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

Is Fox News a propaganda operation or merely a partisan news organization?

Tom Rosenstiel

I think that because of the way Trump has begun to interact with certain programs and because of the way Fox has allowed some of its personnel to interact with the administration, there are parts of Fox News that are now a propaganda arm of the government. That is absolutely an accurate description of the situation right now.

Sean Illing

When you say “parts of Fox News” are now propaganda, what do you mean? Which parts?

Tom Rosenstiel

The synchronicity between Fox & Friends and Trump, for example: the fact that he’s watching, and they know it, and know that he is in turn tweeting out things they say while the show is still on and that those tweets are being picked up. This is an active collaboration, and it’s conscious and direct. So it’s not just a mere ideological affinity. Both sides are working with each other.

The same thing is true, but even more so, of Trump and Sean Hannity. Hannity and the president reportedly talk almost every day. Hannity advises Trump on messaging. Hannity then echoes much of that messaging on his program.

This sort of thing may have been going on at a more indirect level for years in the political journalism world, but it is one thing for the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section to have a consistent ideology and to write from the point of view of that ideology. It is another thing to coordinate your battle plans with the current White House. And this is exactly what we’re seeing today.

“MSNBC and CNN are building their networks on outrage. People hate Trump so much that they’re watching to see their anger reflected back at them.”

Sean Illing

Do you know of any evidence, apart from the synchronicity of messaging, that Trump is dictating talking points to anyone at Fox News?

Tom Rosenstiel

There’s a growing body of reporting establishing the close relationship between the Trump administration, Trump personally, Rupert Murdoch [the founder and acting CEO of Fox News], different shows on Fox, and specific on-air personalities, most closely Sean Hannity.

Most recently, Jane Mayer did a long piece connecting a number of dots and making a persuasive case that the relationship goes far beyond ideological affinity, to a kind of collaboration that has tilted the scales from Fox News doing opinion journalism with grounding in the principles of news to it being an extension of the administration whose purpose, while always commercial, has become focused on supporting the president — a political outcome — rather than covering him.

That is when you tilt from journalism to becoming propaganda: when your goal is no longer informing the public but promoting a particular political outcome.

Sean Illing

What’s the real difference between propaganda and partisanship?

Tom Rosenstiel

Partisan journalists are interested in getting people to consider ideas. Propagandists are interested in moving the public to a particular position to achieve a particular outcome.

If my goal is to shift public support to a position so that the president has more popular support to do something, that’s propaganda. If my goal is simply to get people to accept what I think are good ideas, I’m a partisan journalist. I may be a sloppy journalist, but I’m still engaged in civic discourse as opposed to civic persuasion.

Sean Illing

Fox News has always been partisan in its ambitions; I think we all accept that. But has it always been a propaganda arm? Or did it cross a line at some point and become something different?

Tom Rosenstiel

That’s a really important question because you’re playing with fire in journalism when you build an audience around an ideology. If you want to stay on the journalistic side of things, you need at times to do what any news organization does, which is to surprise your audience, to annoy them, to inform them of things that are inconvenient.

This is especially true in television, where you’re constantly watching your ratings day to day, hour to hour, show to show. There is a great risk that you become so concerned with keeping ratings up that you become addicted to pandering to your audience, and you’re unwilling to tell them inconvenient things.

When Rupert Murdoch started Fox News in 1996 because he thought there was an audience for this kind of journalism, he was engaged in a business enterprise. But once you’ve built that audience and you’re constantly feeding them, you eventually lose control. You have to keep inflaming them; you have to keep building up their fear and anger. And that’s when you’ve crossed a line and are engaged in something else entirely.

So Murdoch is no longer engaged in an act of business; this is a political and propaganda operation, whether he intended it to be or not.

Sean Illing

To be fair, there are actual journalists at Fox News, people like Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith, who do solid work and refuse to toe the line. At the same time, the cynic in me wonders if people like that are at the network mostly to provide cover for the more toxic figures, like Hannity.

Tom Rosenstiel

I wouldn’t say that they operate as cover, but I do think it’s a red herring to say, as Fox often does, that there are talk shows and there are news shows. That’s bogus because the same people are watching Fox throughout the day. It’s a core audience. It’s not like people say, “Oh, it’s time for talk shows, so I’m going to turn it off.” That’s not the way it works.

There’s a core audience for Fox News, which is a faction of the Republican Party, and they watch it whenever they watch it, and they expect to have their demands served all the time. But there are people at Fox News who, from time to time, speak truth to their audience. I wouldn’t call them “cover” because that makes it sound like they’re engaged in some cynical act.

Sean Illing

That’s not what I meant. They don’t have to operate self-consciously as cover. They could be doing their jobs completely in earnest and still be functioning as cover for the propagandists.

Tom Rosenstiel

I would agree with that.

Sean Illing

Why should Americans be concerned about all this? What is the danger of allowing the most popular cable news network in America to become a mouthpiece for an administration?

Tom Rosenstiel

I think there are two enormous threats. It’s hard to understate how important these things are. One is that you are extremely influential to a core group of the American public, a large portion of Republicans. Not the majority, but an important faction of Republicans get a lot of their news from Fox about national affairs.

Once you start to shade the facts, once you engage in persuasion rather than informing, once you’re in cahoots with the government, you’re really destroying the constitutional relationship between the press and the government. And you’re doing a disservice to these citizens, to your audience.

The most important conservative television news source in America is currently pandering to an extremist president. It’s distorting the Republican Party. It’s damaging the Republican Party. It’s changing conservatism. Fox is making the news, not covering it. It’s remaking the Republican Party, not informing its audience.

The second big threat is that it completely distorts what people think and expect from journalists. It has made it much, much harder for the vast majority of journalists who work in local newspapers, websites, and magazines — who are engaged in trying to check the facts — to do their jobs. Because Fox News has helped turn the national image of journalism into a charade, and that makes it harder for people who are trying to do real journalism and inform citizens about the world around them.

Sean Illing

I don’t want to let you go without talking about how CNN and MSNBC fit into all this. I often hear people draw an equivalency between Fox News and MSNBC in particular, but I don’t buy it. MSNBC has an obvious partisan slant, but they don’t appear to be in the propaganda business the way Fox News is.

Tom Rosenstiel

I don’t think the question is, “Are they exactly equivalent?” They’re not mirror images of each other. But the problem is that once you start to build an audience based on outrage and anger, as MSNBC and CNN are both doing in the age of Trump, you risk tumbling down a slippery slope, which is exactly what happened to Fox News.

I don’t believe that Rupert Murdoch set out to create Trump or to become a mouthpiece for the government. Their highest-rated guy for years and years was actually Bill O’Reilly, who would strategically disagree with Republican Party orthodoxy on certain things.

I think that Fox News gradually morphed into this over a long period of time because it made them money and because they got in bed with a political consultant [Roger Ailes] and put him in charge of their network early on.

The problem is that MSNBC and CNN are building their networks on outrage. People hate Trump so much that they’re watching to see their anger reflected back at them. And you can see this impacting the anchors, who gradually start to fall into this role of venting frustration and disgust on behalf of the viewers.

“Fox is making the news, not covering it. It’s remaking the Republican Party, not informing its audience.”

Sean Illing

Do you think that MSNBC and CNN are helping to normalize the Fox News model?

Tom Rosenstiel

Definitely. If you turn on CNN or MSNBC right now during primetime hours, what you’re likely to see is partisan outrage. And your model of what’s news is this distorted thing. Is CNN in cahoots with Nancy Pelosi the way that Fox News is in cahoots with Trump? No. But it’s increasingly rare to find independent voices providing news in a dispassionate way. It just doesn’t fit into the business model of news in this climate. The audience is dictating everything.

Sean Illing

Distinctions aside, what all three of these networks have in common is a commercial bias that is perverting their incentive structures, and I think it’s turning news into a TV show governed by the laws of entertainment and spectacle.

Tom Rosenstiel

You’ve said it better than I have. You know a line has been crossed in this business when you’re exploiting the news for commercial reasons rather than covering it, and all three are now doing that. What makes Fox unique is that it’s doing it in a materially different way, using ideology as their form of exploitation.

Sean Illing

Given all these trends, given the commercial success of Fox News and other cable news networks, where do you see all of this going? What’s next?

Tom Rosenstiel

It’s alarming because in many ways Fox and MSNBC have walked right into Trump’s trap when he says the press is “the enemy of the people.” They’ve built up their audiences based on anger or support for Trump, and now they’re attached to it.

I worry that, as I said, MSNBC and CNN are normalizing what Fox has done by being paler versions of it, and that it’s going take journalism years to recover. First, we have to have a different kind of political landscape, and then perhaps you’ll see the networks follow their audience toward a more moderate place. But even then, it’s just another form of pandering, and that’s not what the news media is supposed to do.

Journalism is in rough shape as it is, but if you have the televised representation of journalism turning it into this distortion, it makes it very hard for journalists everywhere else. We all sort of know what Fox is now, but I really do worry that CNN and MSNBC are also helping to destroy journalism from within.