President Donald Trump’s Fox News obsession frequently yields outcomes that are difficult to directly explain without sounding crazy. But even by those low standards, this one is a doozy.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, one of more than two dozen Fox alums Trump has nominated or appointed to senior administration posts, announced in a Friday appearance on the network that he had teamed up with his wife Rachel Campos-Duffy, a current Fox host, to produce The Great American Road Trip, a reality TV show that they had filmed driving across the country with their children.
Naturally, the Fox & Friends hosts helped roll it out, yukking it up with their current and former colleagues and telling them that “you’re inspiring us” to take road trips of their own.
The Duffys largely fielded questions like, “Sean, as transportation secretary, I assume this was your idea,” and “one of the coolest things [you did was] in Philadelphia, the Rocky steps, running up the Rocky steps,” and “what does the president say when you walk in with all nine of the children?”
At one point, though, Ainsley Earhardt accidentally committed journalism. When she jokingly asked, “Is this a taste of a possible reality show for y’all one day,” Campos-Duffy revealed that “reality TV people” often come to them asking to “do a show with your family,” and that they decided to “do this one for free.”
In other words, the show they shot while Sean Duffy was a public employee serves as a brand-building exercise for future for-profit endeavors.
Earhardt, Griff Jenkins, and Brian Kilmeade offered no suggestion that it was unusual or untoward for a cabinet secretary — one also assigned at times the duties of administrator of NASA — to spend extensive time shooting a reality TV show during what Duffy described as “over the course of seven months.”
The trio also offered no questions about who paid for the show. When actual journalists looked into it, they discovered that its production is funded via a nonprofit and that “several of the show’s sponsors — including Boeing, Toyota, Shell, Royal Caribbean Group and United Airlines — are companies that Duffy’s department oversees and regulates.”
And of course, no one at Fox cares that one of their hosts was shooting government propaganda films in her spare time.
Fox has apparently run out of journalistic norms to destroy — so they’re creating new ones.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
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