Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America

by Dan Pfeiffer

On paper, the two networks have the same format: news during the day and opinion at night. However, that’s where the similarities end. MSNBC, both its news and opinion sides, operates under traditional rules of journalism, with fact-checkers, editors, and accountability. MSNBC is an adjunct of NBC News, and for the most part, its reporting adheres to the standards for the nonideological parent network. At Fox, however, the editors are full partisans. In 2018, John Moody, one of the most senior Fox execs, responsible for the news side of the operation, was forced into retirement after writing an op-ed suggesting that the US Olympic Committee would like to change the Olympics motto from “‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’ to ‘Darker, Gayer, Different.’” Moody’s sin, in the eyes of the higher-ups at Fox, was not being a bigoted asshole; it was being a bigoted asshole in public and lifting the very thin veil of faux objectivity for the “journalists” at his network.