The perfect Fox page

The New Yorker raised an entertaining question last week: "Fox News has always been partisan. But has it become propaganda?" For all the fine reporting in the article (and there's a lot), the hed is still sort of a riddle wrapped in an enigma inside a distinction without a difference. Fox hasn't changed anything about its newsgathering, sourcing, editing,presentation or framing practices (OK, except that now it's using actual cartoons occasionally, which I find charming.) Fox is in a different sort of relationship with the executive because we have a different sort of executive branch, not because Fox is any more or less of a propaganda outfit than it was three, or seven, or 12 years ago. 

Enjoy, for example, the top of the Tuesday morning front page. Is there a particular reason -- given that the Kenyan usurper left office at the beginning of 2017 -- that Rahm Emanuel is at the top of the page? Well, he's joining in the chorus calling on the Democratic Party not to give in to those pesky socialists. The No. 2 story -- no, we are not trying to get a head start on The Week In AOC -- reminds us again that the Bronx sorceress does not know her place and needs to sit up straight and learn from her betters. Which, as the No. 3 story reminds us, is not going to happen because (in another of last week's consistent themes) the junior witches already have Hecate captive.

So Fox's themes are converging on the menace of socialism, as carried out by the  revolutionary youth brigade of the opposition. What strikes me as a bit odd, and what to me supports the idea that mere partisanship is not at stake here, is that if you're interested real-life developments Tuesday involving the Menace of Socialism in real life, there's a Foxalicious example waiting:

You'd like to think events that actually portend ill are a bit more interesting than a cartoon of AOC and her weird sisters, but fear at Fox isn't closely coupled with reality.