Fox News commentators and hosts have been pretty effusive about President Trump's diplomatic overtures to and warm relationship with North Korea's Kim Jong Un, as The Daily Show playfully pointed out on Monday. They were not similarly effusive about similar but less grandiloquent efforts in the previous administration, as CNN media critic Brian Stelter noted more pointedly Monday afternoon.
"The coverage of Trump and Kim versus the coverage in the past, when former President Barack Obama would be willing to reach out to some rogue states or autocratic regimes, the hypocrisy burns," he said, playing some back-to-back examples. "You mash it up together, it looks especially bad for Fox, but on a daily basis, some of these talk shows, this is why it sounds like propaganda, this is why it sounds like something out of North Korea, because it is so dependent on who's in charge and what party they're in." Host Brooke Baldwin agreed: "If this were a Democrat stepping foot into North Korea, he or she would be excoriated."
CNN criticizing Fox News is not all that surprising. But Fox News hosts agreeing with the critique is something different. On Monday evening's The Five, Jesse Watters praised Trump for moving the Korean peninsula toward peace. "Historians will acknowledge that this step across the DMZ was a very powerful and important moment," he said. Greg Gutfeld said of course Democrats are attacking Trump, because in an election year "that's what you would do. And let's be honest, if it were the adversary, an adversary from your party on the other side, we would do the same thing." Watters laughed and added: "How dare Obama meet with a dictator and no preconditions!" "Exactly," Gutfeld said.
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The five hosts make some good points — Juan Williams argued that Trump is doing nothing to actually denuclearize North Korea — and you can watch the entire conversation, self-awareness and all, below. Peter Weber
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