The stunning win by Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York’s mayoral primary is nothing short of a godsend for Fox News, allowing the Trump-loving channel to unleash its most outlandish stereotypes about both New York and the Democratic Party.
“We will introduce you to the 33-year-old radical extremist,” Sean Hannity said on Tuesday, scarcely able to contain his glee at the target-rich prospect of Mamdani being “one step closer to running America’s largest city” while predicting a “mass exodus” of New Yorkers.
“America doesn’t want this,” Brian Kilmeade said during a head-shaking election postmortem Wednesday on “Fox & Friends.” “New York may want it. But America doesn’t want it.”
The big city provocation by the Trump administration, with its mass-deportation crackdown in L.A. and its fear-mongering in New York, has lately had the president declaring war on America’s three biggest cities, arguing in a recent tweet that Democratic officials in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago “actually want to destroy our inner cities — And they are doing a good job of it!”
Fox News Channel’s top names agreed with Trump, as they invariably do, painting those cities as dystopian hellholes overrun by an immigrant “invasion” — opinions they voiced, with little sense of irony, from the heart of Manhattan, just as their Fox Entertainment counterparts occupy choice real estate in L.A.
More “I Hate New York” than “I Heart New York,” the disconnect between rhetoric and geography invites a simple question: If these major media centers are as terrible as they say — and consistently make them appear — why on Earth would they want to live and situate their corporate headquarters there?
From that perspective, the protests neatly dovetail with Fox’s vision of Democrat-run cities as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.
The hostility and sense of otherness toward key urban bastions has existed for a long time, but it stands in particularly stark relief as Trump and key operative Stephen Miller have escalated the level of confrontation with the U.S.’s big blue metropolises, while marquee hosts at Fox — which leases more than a million square feet of office space in New York — cheer them on.
“They say they want the criminals out, but then they shelter them in the sanctuary cities,” Jesse Watters sneered regarding Democratic leaders during Fox’s “The Five,” illustrating the conversation with no-context footage and labeling the protests “anti-ICE riots.” Not to be outdone, co-host Greg Gutfeld spoke last week of cities awash in crime and “hotels filled with illegals” in New York.
Yet Fox’s corporate posture speaks differently, certainly in terms of its relationship with New York and L.A. Indeed, Fox management made a longterm commitment to its location in midtown Manhattan — a stone’s throw from other major news operations its hosts deride — by signing a new 20-year lease in 2023. Rupert Murdoch himself bought a 6,500 square foot apartment on Central Park South in 2023 for $35.2 million, according to Architectural Digest.
For Fox and Trump (himself the scion of New York privilege), targeting big cities yields practical benefits. Sarah Longwell, founder of the Never Trump site The Bulwark, explained the politics behind the enforcement approach to MSNBC by saying, “Pick a fight with California, because we feel like that’s popular with our base, and at least we can hold on to them while we’re struggling in these other areas.”
Ignoring its zip code, Fox wrings considerable mileage from portraying chaos in major cities and highlighting the weirdest protesters it can find, as a Watters producer did at one of the “No Kings” events on a recent episode.
“All of Fox does that. You find your opposition’s fringe, and you don’t just expose them, but you promote them,” Michael Socolow, a media historian and professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine, told TheWrap. “They’ve been doing this for years in their attacks. It gives a very distorted version.”
Asked to address the seeming conundrum of its coverage, Fox News’ New York-based publicity team didn’t respond to requests for comment. The L.A.-based Fox broadcast network — which operates separately but reports to the same top-level management — had no comment.
As familiar as this posturing is to even occasional viewers, its roots reach much farther back than even Fox’s introduction under founding CEO Roger Ailes in 1996.
Socolow traced it to Ailes’ one-time boss, Richard Nixon, and his vice president Spiro Agnew, who regularly lashed out at the media as not being representative of “real America” (the “Silent Majority,” as Nixon put it) in an effort to put news organizations on the defensive.
Through the years, the practice has persisted, including not just Fox but now social media accounts devoted to digging up examples of liberal excess in those heavily populated Democratic strongholds to rile up the GOP faithful.
“This has been a pretty steady tactic by Fox and other right-wing media sources,” A.J. Bauer, a professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama, told TheWrap. “The base of the modern conservative movement is in the suburbs and rural areas, and they don’t go to the cities very often. Fox capitalizes on that lack of knowledge.”
In many respects, events like protests are tailor-made spectacles for television, which relies on pictures, and the crowds pushing back against Trump and Miller’s immigration policies have produced plenty of arresting images. The problem is those snapshots — a burned car here, a waved Mexican flag there — prey on the audience’s ignorance by misleading them about the reach and impact of unrest that, in a sprawling city like Los Angeles, still leaves most of the population oblivious to what far-away viewers are seeing.
“I just don’t think anybody in America knows the size of Los Angeles. I do think they take advantage of that,” Socolow said, posing these questions for Fox News: “Do you think your representation of crime in America is accurate? Is this ethical and professional? Because their defense is just we turn the camera on, and the protest is happening.”
Zooming in on a few blocks of a major city lets Fox News traffic in the network’s most valuable unit of currency: Fear. Even former host Tucker Carlson surprised some by alluding to that strategy in discussing the debate over U.S. involvement in Iran, saying Fox is using the tried-and-true tactic of “turning up the propaganda hose to full blast and just trying to, you know, knock elderly Fox viewers off their feet and make them submit.”
The same logic defines the portrayal of major cities, despite data indicating they have lower crime rates on a per-capita basis.
“They’re told by Fox News that these are dangerous, scary and violent places,” said Bauer, who has studied conservative media. The net effect further divides us, he added, while suggesting the coverage “perpetuates that distance by breaking people’s will to understand their fellow human beings. It’s a way of keeping us separated.”
Since the protests began (and quickly dissipated), Fox has kept recycling the chaotic early images when discussing the issue to visually buttress sometimes highly questionable arguments.
On Fox’s “Outnumbered,” for example, retired General Jack Keane likened recent events in L.A. — and Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard over California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s objections — to the widespread rioting and looting that followed the Rodney King verdicts in 1992. For anyone who lived through that time, it’s a patently ridiculous comparison.
Brenda Victoria Castillo, president & CEO of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for human and civil rights, said she is “very disappointed” in how Fox News and other conservative media have covered the protests, noting she was in Downtown L.A. when they started, and the vast majority of those on hand were peaceful.
“They created a false story, a narrative that was not true,” Castillo told TheWrap. “They focused on one flag, they didn’t show the sea of flags. It was really dehumanizing. They’re trying to portray us as savages.”
In some respects, Fox News is merely advancing Republican talking points, as it often does, helping create a political-media feedback loop that Vice President JD Vance joined on his recent visit to Los Angeles, saying he saw a great American city being “destroyed” by illegal immigration.
“‘We saved Los Angeles from burning,’” Castillo said, quoting a comment by Trump. “Los Angeles was not burning, I promise you.”
The president also remains one of the network’s most loyal viewers, making the relationship even more symbiotic. As the chyron on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show summarized reports about Fox’s influence over Trump’s decision to bomb Iran, “HIS INTEL WAS THE TV.”
Whether Fox hosts fully believe the arguments they push is beside the point, although text messages made public by the Dominion lawsuit suggest there is occasionally daylight between what they say on TV and behind the scenes. Ultimately, what matters is their viewers buy into it, in ways that sow division and promote distrust, orchestrated from the unlikely epicenter of their perch on Sixth Avenue.
Calling attention to Fox’s role in contributing to that toxicity is hardly new, but the argument was nicely encapsulated by legendary newsman Ted Koppel’s 2017 interview with Hannity (who, it’s worth noting, has walked the walk regarding New York by buying a mansion in red-state Florida). When Hannity lamented that Koppel thinks he’s “bad for America,” Koppel agreed, explaining, “Because you’re very good at what you do, and because you have attracted people who are determined that ideology is more important than facts.”
When it comes to its depiction of America’s biggest cities, Fox has demonstrated that ideology also trumps geography. Small wonder Angelenos keep fielding calls from Fox-viewing relatives in other states convinced that “L.A. is burning,” even though it’s not.
