Trump's ex-spokeswoman Sarah Sanders heads into media

The former spokeswoman for US President Donald Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is to join Fox News, the highly conservative news outlet favored by the president and known for its outspoken support for him.

Sanders, 37, has been hired to provided political commentary and analysis from September, Fox News said. It said she would appear across all its properties, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network and the radio and podcast division.

Her move into media runs counter to the previous direction taken by many of Trump's associates, with more than a dozen former executives and contributors to the network being hired by the president, including Bill Shine and Heather Nauert.

Sanders' stint as press secretary saw her often come under fire from critics who saw her as upholding a culture of dishonesty in the White House. She herself admitted to federal investigators who were carrying out a probe into Russian interference in 2016 elections that she had lied to reporters in a May 2017 press briefing.

She was also known for taken an adversarial stance to many journalists from non-Trump-friendly networks, accusing them of spreading "fake news."

'Beyond proud'

In a statement, Sanders, who is the daughter of conservative politician and Christian minister Mike Huckabee, said she was "beyond proud" to join Fox, calling its broadcasting staff an "incredible stable of on-air contributors." She said she would first go on air on September 6.

A former news anchor from rival news network CBS, Dan Rather, tweeted that the "news that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is joining Fox News is about as surprising as water flowing downhill."

Sanders' predecessor, Sean Spicer, who stood on an equally contentious footing with the press and the truth, is also moving into a media job. He is slated to appear in "Dancing with the Stars," a dance contest broadcast by the ABC network.

Spicer was particularly notorious for having stated that Trump's inauguration had been attended by "the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe." The claim, one also promulgated by the president himself, was demonstrated to be patently false.

tj/msh (AFP, AP)

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