At 11am on Friday, the S&P 500 fell by about 4%, along with a drop of nearly 5% the day before.
On Fox News, Harris Faulkner opened the 11am newscast with the following declaration:
“President Trump maintains another campaign promise. He has done it to lean the global economy, balance unfair trade and bring manufacturing back to the US. And it's getting responses all over the world.”
That's one way to put it down.
As Faulkner continued, “President Trump is still convinced that his plans will stimulate the economy” – Fox News has become an outlier among the leading cable news networks, as there were no on-screen stock tickers to allow viewers to track the market themselves.
Over the past 24 hours, Fox News has predicted a prominent calm on the worst stock market sale since the 2020 pandemic. Its popular website, FoxNews.com, had few headlines about slower market performance. In the edition of “The Five” of “The Five,” the network's highest-rated show, the longtime Trump Alliance, declared, “I don't really care about 401(k) today.”
“Why do you know?” Pirro continued. “I'm not able to afford it, it's not that it's not important, and when I have to worry about the 401(k), it's not that I'm not at the point of my life.
Brett Bayer launched the network's 6pm flagship newscast on Thursday. “President Trump believes things are going very well on the first day of his new tariffs. Financial markets around the world aren't moving along exactly along that. It was a brutal day on Wall Street, but stocks are still higher than a year ago.”
Another network that appeals to conservative viewers, Newsmax also didn't feature on-screen stock tickers that showed market disruption. Instead, NewsMax opened trading in the open market on Monday, providing viewers with real-time updates on the price of its own stock NMAX, which was seen violently between $14 and $265 per share. (By Friday lunch, I was trading about $55 per share.)
Faulkner admitted in the program on Friday that “the market is down again today.”
