President Trump 'now spends hours some mornings watching Fox News'

(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

published 2 March 2017

With the weight of the world quite literally resting on his shoulders, President Trump still manages to carve hours out of his schedule to watch TV. Most of those hours, Bloomberg reported Thursday, are devoted to Fox News:

Long a voracious consumer of cable news, Trump has cut back how much he watches CNN and MSNBC in recent weeks, having sworn off the latter network's Morning Joe after criticism from its hosts, according to a senior White House aide privy to the president's viewing habits.Instead, the president now spends hours some mornings watching Fox News, switching occasionally to CNBC for business headlines, along with a daily diet of newspapers and press clippings, said the official, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. On the evenings when he doesn't have a dinner or briefing, Trump will spend most of his TV-viewing time watching Fox News shows hosted by Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity, the aide said. [Bloomberg]

Trump's loyal viewership is already giving advertisers some ideas. Trump has been known to repeat — often verbatim — what he hears on cable news, and the public's increased interest in politics in the age of Trump has already given networks' ratings a healthy boost. "If you're a lobbying outfit, buying commercials on Fox News may be as effective as campaign donations to the right member of Congress," said Mark Feldstein, a broadcast journalism professor at the University of Maryland.

But what's good for advertisers isn't necessarily good for the president. "On one hand, it's always good for a president to have independent sources of information from the hermetically sealed bubble that exists in the White House," Feldstein said. “But to the extent that he's getting news from cable television, which isn't the most reliable source of information, he's getting pretty distorted information."