Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham on Tuesday said officials in former President Trump’s administration would regularly count on Fox News as the main source of favorable coverage for the administration.
“That’s just where we went to get what we wanted out,” Grisham said during an appearance on CNN’s “New Day.”
“By and large, they didn’t get tough with us. They just took what we were saying and disseminated it,” Grisham said.
Grisham drew a connection between viewers of Fox News and “people who went to the Capitol for Jan. 6.”
“Again, I’ve had a lot of time to grapple with this and I feel horribly guilty about my part in it,” she said. “Because I went on Fox a lot.”
The former top press aide, who was regularly criticized by media pundits for not holding daily briefings with reporters at the White House, named former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs as one personality whose show she “looked forward” to appearing on during her time promoting Trump’s agenda.
“Because Lou Dobbs would do all the talking about how great everything was and I would just nod and say yes,” she said.
There are “legitimate” journalists who work at Fox News who would ask tough questions of the administration, Girsham conceded, before adding Fox’s programing in “the evening” was more akin to “state-run media,” for Trump.
Fox News did not respond to a request for comment on Grisham’s remarks.
She separately made reference to smaller conservative news outlets like One America News (OAN) and Newsmax, which she described has having growing audiences “who could potentially cause a lot of damage.”
Fox News, the top-rated cable news channel in the country, dwarfs the audiences of both OAN and Newsmax.
Grisham has in recent days been conducting a series of media interviews to promote her new book “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” which paints Trump’s White House as having a culture of fear and dishonesty.
She said during an interview on “Good Morning America” on Monday that the decision to not hold briefings with members of the press corps during her time as press secretary was a directive from Trump.
In the waning days of the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump grew increasingly critical of Fox News’s coverage of his administration, tweeting at one point that top brass at the network had betrayed their “golden goose.”
Fox was the first major network to project the state of Arizona had been won in the presidential race by Democrat Joe Biden.
In a blistering rebuke of his former press secretary, Trump last week called Grisham “very angry and bitter.”
“She had big problems and we felt that she should work out those problems for herself,” Trump said in a statement. “Now, like everyone else, she gets paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things.”