Jenner became an American hero after he won the gold medal in the 1976 Olympic decathlon. He was even on a Wheaties box and was a role model for both athletes and other types of competitors.
Bruce now goes by the name "Caitlyn" and pretends he's a woman. Fox News announced this week it has hired him as a contributor. Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality says the network will, of course, also pretend Jenner is a woman.
"The policy will be to always use the so-called 'gender-affirming pronouns,'" LaBarbera tells AFN. "Basically, this means that Fox will become a transgender propaganda outfit."
Jenner made his first appearance as a Fox News contributor during "Hannity" on Thursday evening (above). During the segment, he told Sean Hannity he didn't join the network to be a "trans activist."
"That's just one part of my life," Jenner said. "There's so much more to me."
Indeed, LaBarbera says the influence Jenner brings will go far beyond just the use of a woman's name and pronouns. According to the family advocate, Jenner will signal the acceptance of sexual confusion to a sea of conservative viewers who won't give the time of day to someone like Joe Biden's assistant secretary for health, transgender Richard Levine.
"Nobody [watching Fox News] is going to listen to some nut-ball or some radical transgender Democrat," LaBarbera argues. "However, a lot of conservatives [who are watching] will say Hey, Caitlyn Jenner is a conservative and she is a Republican."
The result, LaBarbera concludes, is that alleged "conservative" LGBTQ advocates and LGBTQ-identified people like Jenner, Richard Grenell, and Tammy Bruce "end up becoming change agents for this movement – only on the conservative side."
Meanwhile, Fox News on a roll
Fox News finished the first quarter of 2022 in first place for the 81st straight quarter. That's more than 20 years at the top of the roost – and it seems to be getting worse for the competition. The first three months of 2022 saw a 22% increase in viewers over the same time last year, while both CNN and MSNBC lost roughly half of their audience.
Kyle Drennen of Media Research Center says those two latter networks almost seem content to fight it out for a distant second place.
"The media environment nowadays is so fractured that [for] MSNBC, CNN, [and] a lot of these outlets, it seems like their business model isn't really to even appeal to a large segment of the population," he observes. "It's just a sort of 'we have this niche [and a] stable audience' [model]."
According to Drennen, CNN and MSNBC could make corrections but have chosen to put activism over journalism. "They do see themselves more as political activists than journalists," he continues. "It's all about crafting a narrative that benefits their side, which is the left-wing in the Democratic Party."
CNN in particular, he explains, is squandering a deep and impressive heritage. It led the coverage of the Vietnam War – and while other networks were talking on the telephone with their foreign correspondents at the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1991, CNN had live pictures. But Drennen detects a glimmer of hope on the horizon for that network.
"There's a lot of talk, a lot of noise about this merger with Discovery; that CNN may try to go back toward being a legitimate news outlet. We'll see if that happens," he concludes.
