Jay Rosen on right-wing TV drifting 'further from the real,' and how journalists should 'rethink and rebuild' to cover it

Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at NYU and authors the PressThink blog, discusses the devolution of Fox News; the difficulty of describing a "shifted political universe" in the United States; and the need for news outlets to be "much more explicitly and aggressively pro-democracy." He says "Fox is becoming in some way more demand-driven" because "its audience is in the driver's seat in a way that's more extreme than when Roger Ailes ran the network." For example, Rosen comments, "Do you want January 6 to be the fault of Antifa? You can have that. Do you want Trump to have won the 2020 election? You can have that." Rosen explains that "these kinds of maneuvers are attempting to sever people from reality so that you can do what you want with them... to just sort of de-anchor people from anything that they have in common with their fellow citizens so that they can be manipulated further. And that's why it's so insidious." Rosen says "journalists have to rethink and rebuild their routines" to cover this new political universe. To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy