“We found Fox’s usage of ‘they hate’ has increased over time,” they wrote, “with a clear spike around the polarising 2016 Trump-Clinton election. But Fox’s use of ‘hate’ really took off when Trump’s presidency began. Beginning in January 2017, the mean usage of ‘they hate’ on the network doubled.”
The study found that when Fox News says “they hate”, it most often means “Democrats, liberals, political elites and the media”.“As for the object of all this hatred, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and other Fox hosts most often name Trump. Anchors also identify their audience – ‘you’, ‘Christians’ and ‘us’ – as the target of animosity … these language patterns construct a coherent but potentially dangerous narrative about the world.”
The incessant use of this sort of adversarial rhetoric is a mechanism to develop an "us vs them" attitude in the Fox audience while providing that audience with a target for their own hate. By creating this atmosphere of divisive hate, Fox performs a powerful service for the American hard right and builds a loyal audience who feel they are free to demonize and hate those groups that Fox wants targeted.
Fox’s use of the word “hate”, they said, represented a successful if “dangerous business plan when shared crises demand Americans’ empathy, negotiation and compromise. Fox’s talk of hate undermines democratic values like tolerance and reduces Americans’ trust of their fellow citizens.”
The professors said such division “bodes badly for its handling of what seems likely to be a chaotic, divisive presidential election. In pitting its viewers against the rest of the country, Fox News works against potential solutions to the the very crises it covers.”
Trump's primary focus as president has been to divide Americans. His Americans are the MAGAs. The rest of us are the "haters". It's an ugly vision of our country and Fox News is a major purveyor of that vision.
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