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As if Donald Trump doesn’t have his plate full enough what with Celebrity Apprentice, business mogul-ing (Is that even a word?) and maybe, possibly, it depends…running for president next time around, he is now set to be part of the Fox & Friends “news” show. It seems Fox & Friends will make room on their couch for Trump every Monday morning, cleverly dubbing it “Mondays with Trump.”
I saw some of the stellar promos for Trump’s segment with such lines as: “The Donald now makes his voice loud and clear on Fox.” Boy, they must have gotten some huge powerhouse agency to think that one up. While Fox has never been one to shy away from controversial on-air people, I can’t quite get a handle on what Trump can bring to the news table. Unless it is just basically Trump wanting face time in case he decides to run for president and Fox wanting more ratings for their coffee klatch with Steve Doocy, Gretchan Carlson and Brian Kilmeade.
I don’t watch the trio on Monday mornings or any other morning but the idea of listening to Trump with my coffee first thing in the morning is not my idea of a good wake-up call. Most presidential candidates are distancing themselves from their pundit or “news analyst” roles on TV stations so as not to show any conflict of interest. Newt Gingrich stepped down from his Fox Perch when he supposedly became a presidential candidate. This whole thing leads me to believe that Trump isn’t going to try to run for president at all but is just more of his usual blowhard, look-at-me PR stuff.
Trump however is not any kind of analyst or commentator or pundit but a mere contributor without a contract that will just be on Fox on Mondays, indefinitely or probably until the regular news crew gets sick of him or the viewers can’t take looking at his hair in the morning or his Celebrity Apprentice show gets higher ratings. Or until some Fox focus group tells him he doesn’t have a chance in hell of running a country if he couldn’t run a casino, and running on a platform that President Obama wasn’t born in the USA just isn’t going to cut it.
At least he doesn’t have to worry about being fair and balanced or politically correct or even accurate about anything he says, after all , it’s just FOX.
Newsy1 blog 
Difference between news analyst, commentator and pundit? None
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I decided just yesterday for no reason in particular, to throw my hat into the pundit ring. I’ve heard through other reliable pundits (pretty funny huh, using reliable and pundit in same sentence) that all you need is an opinion and a forum. I figure I have both. My forum might be small by Fox or CNN standards but never-the-less a blog is a blog and you just never know who drops by.
I was in the newspaper business for many years, and the only words we ever used to describe who we were and what we did were typically reporter, correspondent, columnist and of course editor. The editorial was the newspaper version of opinion along with columns, which were the express opinion of the writer who wrote them. As reporters or correspondents (which were our part-time reporters) we wrote news backed up with plenty of facts and sources or it didn’t fly. Pretty cut and dried. But, people even then, expressed confusion about what exactly an editorial was, no matter that I once wrote an editorial explaining to readers exactly what an editorial was. So evidently, opinion and fact and how they are packaged has always been confusing for some. Myself included.
Today of course, we have been enlightened with so much opinion in our news, especially TV news, that the lines seem especially blurred between pundit, commentator and news analyst. I have been researching these three terms for quite a while and have come to the conclusion that pundits, commentators and news analysts are completely interchangeable. For a while, I thought a news analyst was not supposed to have a personal opinion. That he/she was supposed to gather the facts, have some extra deep knowledge to add to those facts that us dummies don’t know and present same to us in an unbiased manner.
But, my new pundit opinion thinking cap got in the way. If you are analyzing a situation how do you do that without bringing your own bias into the mix? How is an analyst going to analyze without coming to some conclusion? And you can’t come to a conclusion and be unbiased. If you just throw out the facts and don’t analyze then you aren’t an analyst anymore just a reporter or a correspondent or someone who just reads the news on TV with no comments whats-so-ever (an unheard of phenomenon). Even interpreting the news, which is something news analysts do often, is still interpreting the news by the standards of the analysts themselves or who ever they work for. So they still have a point of view. A point of view cannot be void of opinion.
This is certainly not think-tank stuff but since a commentator is an opinion person, and a pundit is most definitely an opinion person (think Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck) and since I have personally dropped the status of news analyst to mere opinion person I think a new word to describe all three interchangeable words is in order. Maybe something like anal-puntator or…I’m sure you come can up with plenty of your own.
(If you are a news junkie like I am you might want to pick up a copy of this; http://amzn.to/1rIhuzD “The News: A Users Manual.” It definitely shows how the 24hr. news cycle affects our lives. Now, the author does analyze in this book but maybe I like it because I agree with most of it.) I bought it in hardcover rather than digital just because I find it easier to skim. I am an Amazon affiliate so I do get a small commission If you purchase through my link.
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Filed under buzz, politics, satire
Tagged as bill-oreilly, CNN, commentator, FOX, Fox Broadcasting Company, Glenn Beck, news analyst, pundits, Rush Limbaugh, Television