At 11 a.m. on Friday, the S&P 500 was down about 4 percent, on top of a nearly 5 percent drop the day before.
On Fox News, Harris Faulkner opened her 11 a.m. newscast with the following pronouncement:
“President Trump is keeping another campaign promise. He tilted the global economy, and he’s done that to balance unfair trade and bring back manufacturing to the United States. And it’s getting response around the globe.”
That’s one way to put it.
As Ms. Faulkner continued — “President Trump is still confident his plan will revitalize the economy” — there was no onscreen stock ticker so that viewers could track the market on their own, making Fox News an outlier among the major cable news networks.
Over the past 24 hours, Fox News has projected a conspicuous calm about the worst stock market sell-off since the 2020 pandemic. FoxNews.com, its popular website, has featured few headlines about the poor market performance. On Thursday’s edition of “The Five,” the network’s highest-rated show, the host, Jeanine Pirro, who is a longtime Trump ally, declared, “I don’t really care about my 401(k) today.”
“You know why?” Ms. Pirro continued. “Not that I can afford it, not that it isn’t important, not that I’m not at a point in my life when I should be worried about my 401(k) because I am. But this is what I believe. I believe in this man.”
Bret Baier started the network’s 6:30 p.m. flagship newscast on Thursday by saying: “President Trump says he thinks things are going very well during the first day of his new tariffs. Financial markets around the world not exactly going along with that. It was a brutal day on Wall Street, although stocks are still higher than they were a year ago.”
Newsmax, another network that appeals to conservative viewers, also did not feature a stock ticker onscreen showing the market turmoil. Instead, Newsmax has provided viewers with real-time updates on the price of its own stock, NMAX, which began trading on the public markets on Monday and has wildly seesawed between $14 and $265 a share. (By Friday lunchtime, it was trading around $55 a share.)
Ms. Faulkner, on Friday, did concede during her program that “markets are down again today,” before adding, “However, Trump and his administration say that is to be expected. None of this is a surprise. He says it’s time to settle in for a bit.”
