CNN New Day co-anchor Alisyn Camerota spent 16 years at Fox News before moving to CNN in 2014. As a result, she brings a unique vantage point when it comes to the strong connection between the President of the United States and her former employer.
This connection is something Camerota says she doesn’t love talking about, whether it be on or off-air.
But she’s talking about it anyway.
“I am conflicted because I do not want to insult my friends,” Camerota told THR’s Jeremy Barr in a Q&A. “I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. I don’t like being in this mortal combat position.”
We covered Camerota’s July 2017 book party for Amanda Wakes Up, a novel she wrote that was inspired by her time at Fox, and attendees included Fox Newsers like Shep Smith, Brian Kilmeade, Janice Dean and Rick Leventhal.
“I’m happy to see my Fox friends here, who are thankfully still my friends,” she remarked during a toast.
Do you enjoy talking about Fox News and the network’s connection to the presidency on a regular basis?
No, I don’t enjoy talking about it. I am very conflicted about talking about it. I wish I didn’t have to talk about it. I still have a lot of friends at Fox. I am very close to some people at Fox. I still socialize with people from Fox. So, I don’t like talking about how they run their operation but the times that I talk about it, it’s when the hypocrisy is so astonishing that I can’t help but to talk about it. I remember what the talking points were there, what the mandate was there, I remember the issues that we went crazy with. That drove our news cycle for days, weeks. Now, I can’t believe that they’ve forgotten that. There are times where I just can’t believe the reversal on the air that they have done. …
They went berserk when Barack Obama would use executive action. Now, they don’t care. The idea of sitting down with dictators, the idea that Barack Obama said he might consider that — they went crazy, went berserk with that. So, all I’m looking for is a little like position consistency. … Their 180 degree turn has been astonishing for me. Sometimes it is just hard for me to imagine what Roger Ailes would say about all of that. …
I’m not trying to go rogue. I’m not trying to insult them. I’m trying to point out there is a major discrepancy between what the mission statement as I understood it was and what they’re now saying.
Camerota was also asked if there were de-facto marching orders during her time at Fox (1998-2014)…if there was a significant gap between what she believed and what she said on-air.
When I was there, I wrestled with this all the time. I struggled with it all the time. Trying to keep my job while trying to also preserve my own ethics and moral compass and I struggled with it so much that I wrote a book about it. Amanda Wakes Up was born out of the knowledge that their imbalance was neither, and my frustrations boiled over into my having to write about it. Because I didn’t really have anywhere I could go to vent all of my frustrations about it because Roger was judge and jury, and so I just had to process some of it and it liked spilled out onto the page. So, I have been feeling — the hypocrisy of fair and balanced, I’ve been wrestling with for a long time.
New Day is in third place among the cable news morning shows, and has been in third for a while now. Barr asks Camerota if she worries that her commentary about FNC could come off as “competitive griping.”
I am conflicted because I don’t want to insult my friends. I don’t want to insult my friends. I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. I really don’t want to. I don’t like being in this mortal combat position. … So, the idea that now we’re mortal enemies, I don’t like it, I’m not comfortable with it. Again, I wish I didn’t know about what I knew about how Fox operates. It would make it easier for me to be silent about these things, but when it just becomes so glaringly hypocritical it’s very hard, as a journalist, to just sew my mouth shut and pretend I don’t know what I have.
She also said her working relationship with current Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott was a positive one. “She’s a lovely person…always warm and supportive of me.”