webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

FOX 9 924

SEE FOX 10

ESTB 9 16 24

jrnl fail hurric helene 10 24

see bad trinity

SEE LIE GASLIGHT JAN 6 REVSIONISM

SEE RACISM ILLEGAL VOTER OPEN BORDER BS

SEE TRUMP trans ADMIN 2

see mass deportation

see war on xian bs // white grievance // racism

180 ON RFK2

see tariff

see LA wildfires DEI BS wATTERS?

see offshore wind BS whales

see propaganda

NO BAK 4 25

===

---

MMA MSNBC

NO LNX

Aug. 10, 2025, 3:00 AM PDT

By Matt Gertz, senior fellow for Media Matters for America

Fox News hosts elevated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to help return President Donald Trump to the White House. They then greased the skids for Kennedy’s confirmation as secretary of health and human services. But as he works to demolish American health care research, they are nowhere to be found.

Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic who once described Covid-19 shots as “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” announced on Tuesday that he is terminating nearly $500 million in federal contracts supporting the development of next-generation vaccines and other treatments based on mRNA technology. “After reviewing the science and consulting top experts at NIH and FDA, HHS has determined that mRNA technology poses more risks than benefits for these respiratory viruses,” he said in a video posted online.

Before the pandemic, Kennedy was not a natural fit for the Fox audience.

But Kennedy’s announcement drew harsh criticism from infectious disease experts and other scientists. They warned that the cuts could stall treatments for everything from respiratory illnesses to cancer, leave the nation more exposed to pandemics, undermine public trust in vaccines and threaten U.S. global leadership in medical advances.

While Kennedy’s announcement was widely discussed on MSNBC and CNN, as well as by national broadcast, print and digital outlets, Fox News has almost entirely ignored it. A single 30-second news brief on its “Special Report” program represents the entirety of the Trumpist propaganda network’s coverage through Thursday, according to a Media Matters review.

Fox News may not want to claim credit for Kennedy as he stifles crucial medical research, but it certainly deserves it. You can’t explain the evolution from Trump’s first administration, which fast-tracked the development of mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 through Operation Warp Speed, to the second term’s anti-vax, “Make America Healthy Again” schtick without talking about the network’s role in turning the GOP base against vaccines and toward conspiracy theorists like Kennedy.

'Misinformed' or 'speaking in the wrong terms': Doctor rebukes RFK Jr. over cutting mRNA research

05:03

When pharmaceutical companies began rolling out the vaccines produced under the Trump administration in late 2020 and early 2021, Fox News’ stars could have used the unique influence they have over their viewers to encourage them to get their Covid-19 shots. But Trump had lost his re-election bid, and the network that had worked so hard to keep him in office instead pandered to anti-vaxxers by turning against the vaccination campaign helmed by his successor, President Joe Biden.

Led by its then-prime-time star Tucker Carlson, the network incessantly promoted misleading and false claims about safe, effective vaccines with the potential to save their viewers’ lives — day after day, month after month, year after year. The network uplifted conspiracy theories, gave airtime to conspiracy theorists and culture war vaccine opponents, demagogued against efforts to get more people to receive these lifesaving shots, and propped up ineffective cures as potential substitutes. Fox News continued to broadcast these segments even as more Republican parts of the country, with lower vaccination rates, suffered higher Covid-19 death tolls, as The New York Times’ David Leonhardt detailed.

All of the fawning attention on Kennedy from the right had the impact one would expect.

Before the pandemic, Kennedy, the scion of a Democratic dynasty who once called for a boycott of Fox News host Sean Hannity and described him as a fascist, was not a natural fit for the Fox audience. But with the Covid-19 vaccine campaign underway, his decades of work undermining vaccines and his attacks on the new mRNA vaccines in particular suddenly made him attractive to the right.

When he began his presidential campaign in March 2023 — with Carlson’s show as his launchpad — MAGA media stalwarts saw an opportunity. They treated Kennedy’s bid, first in the Democratic primary and then as an independent candidate, as a potent spoiler candidacy to boost Trump’s return to power. Kennedy became a constant presence on the programs of pro-Trump commentators. Fox provided him with more airtime than many would-be Republican standard-bearers received.

All of the fawning attention on Kennedy from the right — alongside mainstream news coverage of his bizarre history, such as his claim that a parasite in his brain had triggered memory loss — had the impact one would expect: Kennedy became more popular with Republicans than Democrats. As polls increasingly showed that he was pulling support from Trump, though, MAGA media figures like Hannity abruptly turned on Kennedy. After Carlson reportedly helped to facilitate Kennedy’s decision to drop out and endorse the once-and-future president, Fox hosts resumed showering the anti-vax champion with praise.

‘Explosive’ conservative non-doctor turbocharging RFK Jr’s healthcare coup

05:52

As Election Day approached, talk turned to what reward Kennedy could expect in return. Paul Dans, the former head of Project 2025, floated Kennedy’s name for HHS secretary — and that’s precisely the position Trump nominated him for.

Not everyone on the right was willing to accept Kennedy’s ascent. The editorial boards of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and New York Post denounced the decision and called for Senate Republicans to vote down his nomination.

Murdoch’s print voices lost out to his cable news shouters.

But Fox News hosts were elated. As Kennedy’s nomination moved through the Senate, they touted him as a “reformer” and “true health care crusader” who had “the skills, knowledge, and experience” needed for the job.” When Kennedy said he wasn’t going to take away anyone’s vaccines, Fox said he wasn’t going to take away anyone’s vaccines.

Murdoch’s print voices lost out to his cable news shouters — the Senate confirmed Kennedy on a near-party-line vote, with Sen. Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor, the sole Republican vote against him.

More from MSNBC Daily

Must reads from Today's list

RFK Jr. is truly terrible at his job

Jake Scott

And lo and behold, once confirmed, Kennedy continued the anti-vax project to which he had dedicated years of his life. He yanked $2 billion in funding to vaccinate children whose families may not be able to afford immunizations. He downplayed the importance of vaccination for quelling a measles outbreak even as measles cases hit record highs. He replaced the members of a vaccine advisory board with his own picks — some of whom were notorious vaccine critics — who plan to review the childhood vaccination schedule and scrutinize its components. And now he’s terminated federal funding that could have fueled a new wave of cures.

Under Kennedy’s leadership, the Department of Health and Human Services itself has become a grave threat to public health. That is the regrettable but inevitable consequence of Fox News’ cynical exploitation of its viewers. The network’s hosts should take a bow — they earned it.

Matt Gertz is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive research center that monitors the U.S. media. His work focuses on the relationship between Fox News and the Republican Party, media ethics and news coverage of politics and elections.

:{---

---

mma

WSJ pundits demolish right-wing talking points defending Hegseth: “It all comes back again to this basic point that something's wrong at the top levels”}:

04/24/25

fox stars pass on defending Hegseth amid Pentagon “chaos”

Written by Matt Gertz

:{Published 04/25/25

Fox News’ biggest stars have stopped defending Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth amid the weeklong firestorm over their former colleague’s dysfunctional management of the Pentagon and his potentially illegal handling of classified information.

Three months after Vice President JD Vance broke a 50-50 Senate tie to install the historically underqualified Hegseth at the Pentagon, journalists routinely describe a department in “chaos.” Five top Hegseth aides have left the department since last Friday amid reports of “vicious rivalries,” and a “leadership vacuum.” Reporters further revealed that Hegseth had shared details about U.S. strikes in Yemen in a second unsecured Signal chat, potentially endangering U.S. service members, and had the app installed on his Pentagon computer.

Hegseth responded to his growing list of scandals with a combative Tuesday appearance on Fox & Friends, whose hosts defended his conduct.

But other Fox hosts have been silent, even after rallying to support Hegseth when his nomination came under fire and again following the first revelation of his use of Signal to share attack plans.

Fox’s evening lineup of The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime, Hannity, and Gutfeld!have ignored Hegseth’s struggles this week (a passing remark from guest Jimmy Failla to host Laura Ingraham was the only mention of the story on any of those shows).The Five, the Fox panel show which features Jesse Watters, Greg Gutfeld, Jeanine Pirro, and Dana Perino, also has not covered the subject.

Even Will Cain, who spent years sharing the couch with Hegseth as co-hosts of Fox & Friends’ weekend edition, hasn’t mentioned his former colleague’s name on his afternoon show this week. (He did not comment on Fox correspondent Kevin Corke’s report about the Signal story during Monday’s program.)

As Fox’s stars take a pass, full-throated defenses of Hegseth’s leadership are coming from the likes of MAGA stalwarts like Charlie Kirk, Benny Johnson, and Laura Loomer, while their corporate cousins at The Wall Street Journal editorial board savage his handling of the Pentagon.

Two explanations seem plausible for why Fox’s biggest stars have gone silent as their former colleague comes under fire:

Either way, this disaster was the predictable result of President Donald Trump putting a former Fox weekend host with little relevant experience in charge of the Pentagon. The secretary of defense oversees a massive budget and bureaucracy and has the authority under certain circumstances to launch nuclear weapons and end human civilization. The risks of handing the position over to someone because of their takes on TV are almost incalculably high.

Hegseth is currently struggling to manage the Pentagon when its biggest problem is a costly, ineffective, and apparently unending bombing campaign in Yemen. How will he respond if India and Pakistan start trading fire?

  1. ### Fox stars pass on defending Hegseth amid Pentagon “chaos”

04/25/25

//

  1. ### Trump used Fox to vet his defense secretary. It isn’t going well — but now the network is fighting back.

:{12/04/24

  1. ### Fox propagandists scramble to explain former colleagues texting war plans to a reporter

:{03/25/25

  1. ### The Pete Hegseth debacle was inevitable

04/23/2

---

semi random mma

  1. ### Sean Hannity on Kilmar Abrego Garcia: “It is so obvious to me that this guy deserves what he got”

04/25/25 7:32 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox News reacts to FBI arrest of Wisconsin judge: “This may be signs of an incoming crackdown on what the Trump administration considers ... rogue judges”

04/25/25 12:35 PM EDT

  1. ### By the numbers: As Trump snubs legacy media, data shows his press briefings elevate right-wing outlets

04/25/25 12:32 PM EDT

  1. ### On MSNBC's The 11th Hour, Angelo Carusone describes how right-wing narrative dominance in online spaces is helping to keep Republicans from speaking out on the devastation of Trump's tariffs

04/25/25 12:21 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox stars pass on defending Hegseth amid Pentagon “chaos”

04/25/25 11:43 AM EDT

  1. ### Steve Bannon claims Trump will be running again in 2028: “It's happening”

04/25/25 11:42 AM EDT

  1. ### Fox News reporter on decreased traffic at ports following tariffs: How long will it be “before you start losing hours or shifts or even layoffs?”

04/25/25 11:08 AM EDT

  1. ### Media Matters weekly newsletter, April 25

04/25/25 10:46 AM EDT

  1. ### Newsmax host: “I work in this industry — I think Edward R. Murrow is totally overrated”

04/25/25 9:59 AM EDT

  1. ### Fox host Brian Kilmeade: “Vladimir Putin, I think, to a degree, is embarrassing President Trump”

04/25/25 9:24 AM EDT

  1. ### Sean Hannity justifies Trump’s peace proposal that sharply favors Russia

04/24/25 5:08 PM EDT

  1. ### Sean Hannity on Iran: “I'd just bomb the living hell out of them until they stop”

04/24/25 4:56 PM EDT

  1. ### Laura Loomer calls Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “a personal friend”

04/24/25 4:30 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox Business host: Voters are “not real happy with the economy, with the possibility of a recession, with inflation, and the tariffs”

04/24/25 2:33 PM EDT

  1. ### WSJ pundits demolish right-wing talking points defending Hegseth: “It all comes back again to this basic point that something's wrong at the top levels”

04/24/25 1:02 PM EDT

  1. ### Daily Wire host says Pete Buttigieg is in a “pretend” marriage and “refuses to get married and make a baby the old-fashioned way”

04/24/25 10:56 AM EDT

  1. ### Michael Knowles: “Do your patriotic duty. Make America great again. You gotta have babies. OK? It's your marital duty. It's your patriotic duty.”

04/24/25 10:33 AM EDT

  1. ### YouTube content creators have earned more than 200 million views on videos of their visits to El Salvador’s CECOT prison

04/24/25 10:01 AM EDT

  1. ### Newsmax guest: “Trump doesn't understand who pays the tariffs. ... They're paid for by the middle class and the poor.”

04/24/25 9:17 AM EDT

  1. ### Newsmax guest: “There are things we have to consume and things we don't have to consume. Not all inflation is the same.”

04/24/25

---

LIE GASLIGHT JAN 6 REVSIONISM

How Fox News and the right-wing media made Jan. 6 revisionism great again | Media Matters for America

How Fox News and the right-wing media made Jan. 6 revisionism great again

Written by Matt Gertz

:{Published 01/03/24 mma

Three years after the January 6 insurrection, the initial broad agreement about that day’s depravity lies in ruins. That consensus didn’t unravel on its own — right-wing commentators deliberately dismantled it for power and profit.

Republicans have made their peace with the violent mob of Donald Trump’s supporters that stormed the U.S. Capitol as the culmination of his plot to remain in office, according to a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll the paper reported on Tuesday.

“Republicans are showing increased loyalty to the former president as he campaigns for reelection and fights criminal charges over his attempt to stay in power after losing in 2020,” the Post reported. “They are now less likely to believe that Jan. 6 participants were ‘mostly violent,’ less likely to believe Trump bears responsibility for the attack and are slightly less likely to view Joe Biden’s election as legitimate than they were in a December 2021 Post-UMD survey.”

Right-wing propagandists engineered that shift in GOP views of the January 6 insurrection by creating a revisionist counternarrative out of lies they repeated over and over again. Their work created a permission structure for Republicans to stop caring about the assault of hundreds of law enforcement officers amid an effort to overturn a presidential election by force. That helped ensure that the mob’s leader would remain the GOP’s presumptive nominee in 2024, positioned to carry out the party’s top priorities of cutting taxes for rich people, banning abortions, building huge migrant deportation camps to expel undocumented immigrants Trump claims are “poisoning the blood” of the country, and deploying state power against left-wing “vermin.”

Trump’s 2020 election subversion effort received strong support among his media allies, many of whom backed his claims of a stolen election even as they privately acknowledged those claims were false. When Trump urged the violent mob he had summoned to Washington, D.C., to “fight like hell” to stop the steal — and they responded by attempting to do just that and attacked the Capitol — the right’s propagandists could have washed their hands of the then-president and his violent supporters.

They made a different choice. As I detailed last month:

The right-wing effort to minimize January 6 and Trump’s role in fomenting it began that very day. Fox hosts who knew better told their viewers that Trump’s supporters had been responding to reasonable fears that the election had been stolen, while any violence may have been caused by antifa interlopers.

In the intervening years, Trumpist media stars — led by former Fox host Tucker Carlson — cosseted their viewers with a slew of lies about January 6. There was no “insurrection,” just a “political protest [that] got out of hand” in which “the overwhelming majority” of participants were “orderly and meek.” The rioter shot and killed by law enforcement while trying to breach the speaker’s gallery was a martyr, while the officers who were nearly beaten to death during the attack deserve mockery. The violence was orchestrated by undercover federal agents as part of a sinister plot to imprison patriotic Americans for their conservative views. The events were comparable to staffers for a late-night talk show shooting an unauthorized video in the Capitol complex, or a Democratic congressman foolishly pulling a fire alarm, or progressive protests at state capitols.

IFrame Content

Trump’s 2020 subversion effort ultimately failed — but he still claims that he won the election, and gives every indication that he could try again should he lose in 2024. Voters expect as much: Roughly 7 in 10 respondents say Trump won’t accept the results of the election if he is defeated, according to the Post/UMD poll.

After a yearslong right-wing drumbeat of stolen-election lies and insurrection revisionism, and the corresponding purges of dissident Republican leaders and terror campaigns against election workers, the battleground is more favorable to a second attempt to overturn an election through lies and violence.

//

  1. ### Colorado, the 14th Amendment, and the right’s January 6 revisionism

:{12/20/23

  1. ### Fox News is a loaded gun aimed at American democracy

:{05/14/21

  1. ### Tucker Carlson’s insurrection alternate reality

02/24/21

---

NO PIX VID SEE BUKELE

mma

YouTube content creators have earned more than 200 million views on videos of their visits to El Salvador’s CECOT prison

Both the Trump and Bukele administrations have also used social media as propaganda celebrating the megaprison

Written by Jack Winstanley (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/jack-winstanley)

Research contributions from Payton Armstrong (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/payton-armstrong)

Published 04/24/25

Since 2024, at least five YouTube content creators have been granted access to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, the megaprison to which the Trump administration began sending immigrants last month.

The resulting YouTube videos have been viewed over 200 million times, and at least one creator has appeared on Fox News four times to discuss what he saw while filming. He suggested during one appearance that “if the United States was smart, they would do something just like this as well.”

Both President Donald Trump’s administration and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s government have used social media to push propaganda films celebrating the megaprison as well, despite concerns of potential human rights abuses at the site, and right-wing media have also praised the facility.

The Trump administration is deporting immigrants to El Salvador's CECOT prison without due process}:

Bukele opened CECOT in 2023, earning praise from right-wing media figures

In early 2023, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele opened the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT (https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/el-salvador-opens-40000-person-prison-arrests-soar-gang-crackdown-2023-02-01/), as part of his campaign against criminal gangs operating within the country. Since then, experts (https://www.npr.org/2025/03/17/g-s1-54206/el-salvador-mega-prison-cecot#::text=Cristosal%20and%20other%20advocates%20have%20accused%20authorities%20of%20human%20rights%20violations.) have raised concerns (https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/03/20/human-rights-watch-declaration-prison-conditions-el-salvador-jgg-v-trump-case) about the prison’s harsh conditions (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/04/la-cooperacion-represiva-entre-eeuu-y-el-salvador/#::text=In%20the%20light,Amnesty%20International%2C%20said%3A) and “massive and arbitrary deprivation of liberty,” including the extreme levels of isolation (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/world/americas/bukele-abrego-garcia-elsalvador-prison.html#::text=Extreme%20isolation%2C%20and%20%E2%80%98a%20huge%20silence.%E2%80%99) experienced by the prisoners. One visiting filmmaker called it a “tropical gulag” and an expert described it as “the Salvadoran version of going to Siberia.”

But right-wing media figures have celebrated (https://www.mediamatters.org/candace-owens/activists-are-raising-alarm-about-new-mega-prison-el-salvador-american-right-wing) the facility and suggested that the United States should create similar infrastructure within the country, praising Bukele’s authoritarianism (“This is my kind of authority, baby”) and suggesting that a megaprison would help with America’s “serious crime problem.”

In March 2025, the Trump administration began deporting individuals to CECOT

During an official visit in February 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said (https://www.npr.org/2025/02/04/g-s1-46352/rubio-el-salvador-deportees-americans) Bukele had offered to accept deportees from the U.S., including “dangerous criminals currently in custody and serving their sentence in the United States even though they're U.S. citizens or legal residents.” The following month, President Donald Trump invoked (https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/14/politics/alien-enemies-act-1798-trump-cec/index.html) the Alien Enemies Act to send (https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/16/politics/trump-administration-deportations-alien-enemies-act/index.html) hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador to be imprisoned at CECOT.

Despite ongoing (https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/18/trump-deportations-alien-enemies-act-00299474) legal challenges to the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to justify deporting individuals to El Salvador with little to no due process (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/supreme-court-trump-deportations#::text=What%20does%20habeas%20have%20to%20do%20with%20it%3F), Trump stated during a press briefing alongside Bukele that he is exploring (https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366178/trump-deport-jail-u-s-citizens-homegrowns-el-salvador) detaining U.S. citizens and imprisoning them in El Salvador as well.

YouTubers have earned millions of views on content after visiting CECOT

02/07/24

Mexican YouTuber Luisito Comunica posted a tour of the facility, thanking Bukele’s press secretary for granting him access

In Mexican YouTuber Lusito Comunica’s video, which has been viewed over 56 million times, he says in Spanish that touring the facility “gives a certain feeling of empowerment to a simple citizen like me.” Comunica also spoke positively of the conditions within the facility, stating, “It is easy to suddenly be moved, to touch your heart, to say, 'Wow, what harsh abuse inside the prison.' But when you find out the inhumane atrocities they committed, it makes sense.” YouTube,\2/7/24 (https://youtu.be/69qKUoGhoQo), accessed [4/23/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029515)]

07/26/24

Right-leaning American YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a tour of CECOT and appeared on Fox News at least 4 times to discuss his visit

Pro-Trump YouTuber Nick Shirley’s video, which features a tour of CECOT and Shirley interacting with a group of individuals imprisoned there, has earned over 5.7 million views. Prior to touring CECOT, Shirley had made videos criticizing the Biden administration’s immigration policy and focusing on illegal immigration into the U.S. YouTube,\7/26/24 (https://youtu.be/I34FnQSXpw8&themeRefresh=1), accessed 4/22/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029516);Reuters, [6/13/24 (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pro-trump-influencers-fire-up-fears-migrant-invasion-ahead-us-election-2024-06-13/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&fbclid=IwY2xjawJ04EFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFnNVdra3V2c1FUYzY2TjdJAR45czaz0JGaDIsgazJrb0mONAFckoJIZcqwGA_6waDl8owPil2H3NzNkVYnJA_aem_oc0gJpuaFtxY7BMzWEQqZA)]

The following week, Fox News’ Jesse Watters hosted Shirley to discuss his tour, introducing him as an “investigative journalist” and showing portions of the YouTube video. Shirley told Watters that “if the United States was smart, they would do something just like this as well, to make sure that no criminal gets treated like a normal person.” Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, [8/2/24 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029500)]

Following the Trump administration’s decision to deport individuals to El Salvador, Shirley appeared on Fox at least another three times. On Fox & Friends Weekend, Shirley stated that he worked “for months and months” to get permission to tour the facility, and he ended his appearance by cheering, “Let’s go, El Salvador.” Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, \2/7/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029498); Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 3/29/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029499); Fox Deportes, Fox Noticias, [3/28/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029501)]

10/21/24

Greek UK-based YouTuber Timmy Karter posted his tour of CECOT, earning over 3.7 million views

While discussing concerns over human rights violations at CECOT, U.K.-based YouTuber Karter remarked that it “sounds a bit hypocrisy, because — let’s be honest — U.S.A. is running Guantanamo.” Karter also argued that foreign media outlets should “criticize your own prisons first” before judging CECOT. YouTube,\10/21/24 (https://youtu.be/Pdvuyg5fCXo), accessed [4/22/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029517)]

02/02/25

UAE-based YouTuber Joe Hattab posted a tour of CECOT, earning over 49 million views

United Arab Emirates-based YouTuber Joe Hattab said in his video that the Salvadoran government “invited media outlets to broadcast the scene \at CECOT] to the entire world, serving as a deterrent to anyone who dares break the law.” The description for Hattab’s video celebrates the prison, noting, “Thanks to this prison the country of El Salvador is the safest country in the western hemisphere.” YouTube,[2/2/25 (https://youtu.be/0an7kovsPeQ), accessed [4/22/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029518)]

02/09/25

Turkish YouTuber Ruhi Cenat also posted a video tour, earning over 95 million views

While approaching the facility, someone in the car with Turkish YouTuber Ruhi Cenat can be heard saying that they “have permission from the presidency” to visit the facility. YouTube,\2/9/24 (https://youtu.be/H42zWaD4A4s); accessed [4/22/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029519)]

The Trump and Bukele administrations have leveraged social media to promote CECOT

In March, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem visited the megaprison and posted a video thanking Bukele

In the video (https://x.com/Sec_Noem/status/1905034256826408982/video/1), Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called the facility “one of the tools in our tool kit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”

While several (https://www.axios.com/2025/04/17/politicians-el-salvador-prison-cecot-visits-democrats-republicans-trump) GOP lawmakers have traveled to the megaprison, congressional Republicans and Salvadoran officials have denied (https://www.axios.com/2025/04/17/house-republicans-democrats-el-salvador-trips) requests from Democratic lawmakers to visit (https://www.axios.com/2025/04/16/house-democrats-el-salvador-deportation-trump) the facility.

Bukele’s government has also made ample use of social media to promote CECOT and its wider crackdown on criminal gangs

Dramatically shot videos (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/world/americas/deportation-videos-el-salvador.html) showing detainees being marched off planes by armed military and police units, having their heads shaved, and being hurried into cells have been posted (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/18/bukele-prison-system-human-rights-trump/) to Bukele’s social media accounts in an effort to promote his “no-tolerance policy on crime,” according to The Washington Post.

After then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) visited (https://x.com/mattgaetz/status/1815527485536452928) CECOT in July 2024, Bukele shared (https://x.com/nayibbukele/status/1859345333823648093/video/1) to social media a segment of Gaetz’s speech on the House floor in which he discussed (https://nacla.org/el-salvador-caucus-bukele-exception) his newly formed “El Salvador Caucus” and praised Bukele’s “visionary leadership.” Bukele’s account also shared (https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/matt-gaetz-nayib-bukele-state-violence-rcna180398) a video of Gaetz’s visit to the prison in which Gaetz praised “the good ideas in El Salvador” and noted that “there is a lot more discipline in this prison than we see in a lot of the prisons in the United States.”

Bukele’s government has used a team (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/el-salvador-politics-media/) of paid internet “trolls” and other allied social media accounts to push propaganda and attack dissent. One account, according to The Associated Press, has posted (https://apnews.com/article/bukele-tiktok-youtube-influencers-disinformation-el-salvador-5523937ba0e499af71e7f2ff7e72eeac#::text=One%20account%2C,live%20in%20fear.%E2%80%9D) videos of supposed gang members committing violent crimes, followed by pro-Bukele messaging.

//

  1. ### Fox News attacked due process at least 77 times in just over five weeks (https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/fox-news-made-least-77-claims-attacking-due-process-just-over-five-weeks)

:{04/17/25

  1. ### Fox keeps calling migrants sent to El Salvador prison “criminals” and “terrorists” despite reporting that several deportees were likely falsely accused (https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/fox-keeps-calling-migrants-sent-el-salvador-prison-criminals-and-terrorists-despite)

:{04/01/25

  1. ### CBS News reporting on immigrants deported to foreign megaprison blows up Fox’s “worst of the worst” spin (https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/cbs-news-reporting-immigrants-deported-foreign-megaprison-blows-foxs-worst-worst-spin)

04/07/25

MMA 4 25

April 22, 2025, edition of Fox News' Hannity

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Make no mistake, at the end of the day, this has nothing to do with the Earth cooling, global warming, which has evolved into the generic climate change, so if it gets warm, they have a name for it. If it gets cold, they have a name for it. If it snows, they've got a name for it. If it doesn't snow, they have a name for it.

Look at this list. It's the Green New Deal. Look, everything on this list has nothing to do really with climate. Climate warming, climate cooling, climate changing is the left's mechanism for Marxism, statism as represented by that list, to each according to their need, from each according to their ability. The only thing Democrats really care actually is political power and you being dependent on them.

---

JRNL FAIL?

AN 4 25

Update, April 15: Fox News deleted its story and published a new one late Monday with the headline “Arizona to verify up to 50K people from voter rolls who failed to prove citizenship.*”

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.*

Arizona has not identified up to 50,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls, nor have counties begun canceling any voter registrations, despite news reports over the weekend suggesting otherwise.

The misleading claims showed up in reports by Fox News and other outlets that mischaracterized a recent legal settlement between Arizona counties and the grassroots organization Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona, known as EZAZ.org.

Sunday’s Fox News story carried the headline “Arizona to begin removing as many as 50K noncitizens from voter rolls following lawsuit.” It said that the settlement led to all counties beginning “the process of verifying and removing noncitizens from their voter rolls, including nearly 50,000 registrants who did not provide proof of U.S. citizenship.”

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

“The story is wrong,” said Sam Stone, spokesperson for the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, which led settlement negotiations on behalf of all 15 counties.

What county officials are doing as a result of the settlement, Stone said, is asking the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to provide an additional way for county officials to check voter citizenship.

Counties are not yet sharing voter information with DHS. Maricopa County will not do so unless it can submit the information securely and ensure that the citizenship checks are accurate, Stone said.

The settlement involves a case in which the conservative group America First Legal sued Arizona counties on behalf of EZAZ.org, claiming that election officials were not using all available databases to check voter citizenship, as required by state law. The settlement required counties to send a letter to DHS expressing their intent to submit voter information to get help checking citizenship; reminding the agency of its obligation under federal law to share database information with states; and requesting information about how to submit the voter information, said Merissa Hamilton, founder and chairwoman of EZAZ.org.

Still, Republican leaders such as Kari Lake, the State Department aide and 2024 Arizona Senate candidate, seized on the Fox report to claim that large numbers of noncitizens were voting in Arizona. Lake posted on the social media platform X that “it’s a pyrrhic victory knowing Arizona had to be sued into submission before agreeing to follow the law, & take upwards of 50K illegal voters off its rolls.”

Fox News and Lake did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Fox News headline still appeared on its website with the same language as of midday Monday.

Election officials in Arizona counties already check a person’s citizenship in multiple ways under state laws that require proof of citizenship to register to vote in state and local elections.

Only a handful of other states have passed such laws requiring proof of citizenship for registering to vote. Federal law requires only that a voter attest to their citizenship — under penalty of perjury — by checking a box on their voter registration form.

President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on elections, as well as the SAVE Act, which passed the U.S. House last week, call for requiring citizenship proof nationwide.

In Arizona, around 49,000 active or inactive voters are eligible to vote only in federal elections because they did not prove their citizenship. Another 200,000 longtime residents will need to verify their citizenship status in the coming months because they were affected by a state error in tracking citizenship that was disclosed last summer.

Stone said most of these voters are likely U.S. citizens who simply haven’t submitted the necessary documents.

There’s no national database of U.S. citizens, so county officials in Arizona currently check driver’s license numbers, birth certificates, immigrant IDs and other documents to verify citizenship. The Department of Homeland Security can verify the citizenship status of potential voters individually, Stone said, but isn’t set up to check large groups of voters at once.

The request from Arizona county officials to the federal agency “is really for the creation of a system that would allow for an accurate comparison between county databases,” Stone said.

Trump’s executive order also called for DHS to share database information with states upon request.

America First Legal’s news release about the settlement between the counties and EZAZ.org did not imply that Arizona had 50,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls.

James Rogers, senior counsel for America First Legal, wrote in the release that the settlement will help recorders “find and remove any aliens on their voter rolls.”

“It will also potentially enfranchise federal-only voters whose citizenship is confirmed,” Rogers wrote, “which would allow them to vote in State and local elections.”

*Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen atjfifield@votebeat.org.

---

mma sorta random

  1. ### Study: Most Pro-Trump podcasters support Trump's tariffs but some fractures emerge

:{04/16/25

  1. ### Right-wing media baselessly promoted claim that Tufts student was associated with Hamas — an internal State Department memo said otherwise

04/16/25 11:20 AM EDT

  1. ### Newsmax host: “The Trump administration needs to purge immigration judges”

04/16/25 9:49 AM EDT

  1. ### Newsmax host says Kilmar Abrego Garcia “signed up for the thug life”

04/16/25 9:45 AM EDT

  1. ### Trump's push to bring back coal finds support with right-wing media

04/16/25 9:37 AM EDT

  1. ### Newsmax host: “Professors should have to list if they're Republican or Democrat”

04/16/25 9:26 AM EDT

  1. ### On MSNBC Prime, Angelo Carusone discusses how the Trump administration is systematically targeting news organizations that they consider “oppositional”

04/15/25 8:57 PM EDT

  1. ### Jesse Watters: “When you wear a Bulls hat, it means you're MS-13”

04/15/25 8:35 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox News' Trey Gowdy on Kilmar Abrego Garcia: “What we can't have is any executive disobeying or not following a judge's decision”

04/15/25 6:49 PM EDT

  1. ### Martha MacCallum complains about restrictions on deporting people “en masse”

04/15/25 4:11 PM EDT

  1. ### Article III Project founder Mike Davis on courts: “If they want to keep fighting ... the president is just gonna ignore these lawless and dangerous orders”

04/15/25 4:00 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner asks if “Obama and others in his political camp” are antisemitic for supporting Harvard

04/15/25

---

AN 4 25 GUTFELD

'I refuse to care': Fox host says he 'can live with' Trump imprisoning innocent people

---

MMA

  1. ### Sean Hannity: “I am happy” El Salvador is refusing to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States

04/14/25 4:26 PM EDT

  1. ### Jesse Watters calls Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia a “gang banger” and attacks Supreme Court order to return him to United States

04/11/25

---

WTF?

April 9, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five

JESSE WATTERS (CO-HOST): We didn't want to kill Barack Obama, we just didn't think he was legally qualified to be president because of where he was born. And then Hillary, we didn't want to kill, we were just so afraid of her, we thought she'd kill us first.

But we do this in other countries. The CIA literally uses the same exact propaganda to stir up cultures in other countries to topple dictatorships we don't like. Now, we're doing it in our own country, and it's like almost working.

---

---

mma

Steve Bannon and guest argue rising bond yields mean “tough times ahead” if Trump doesn't secure trade deals and “get government spending down”

04/10/25 2:52 PM EDT

  1. ### Ben Shapiro: “If you wanna see a real bull market, the president should fire Peter Navarro today”

04/10/25 12:32 PM EDT

  1. ### “Art of the Deal”: Fox propagandists spin wildly for Trump’s “huge” tariff “win”

04/10/25 11:51 AM EDT

“Art of the Deal”: Fox propagandists spin wildly for Trump’s “huge” tariff “win”

Written by Matt Gertz

:{Published 04/10/25

Fox News’ propagandists cheered President Donald Trump’s tariff climbdown as a “huge win” that shows he was playing “3D chess” and executing the “Art of the Deal.” Meanwhile, reporters at outlets including Fox pointed out that Trump had “capitulated” out of fear that his unilateral imposition of massive taxes on all of our trading partners was triggering a collapse in the bond market.

Trump announced on Wednesday a 90-day pause on the massive tariffs he had proposed the previous week on dozens of countries and farcically described as “reciprocal,” with the countries instead subject to a still-high 10% tariff during bilateral trade negotiations. At the same time, he increased tariffs on China, the largest U.S. trading partner, to a total of a whopping 145%, and left unchanged sectoral tariffs he has proposed or implemented on steel, aluminum, and cars (he also proposed this week additional tariffs on lumber and pharmaceuticals).

The president and his top advisers had repeatedly said that no pause was being contemplated, and the abrupt reversal reportedly took even some close aides by surprise. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who had been defending the planned tariffs in a House hearing when Trump announced the pause, said he had not been informed of the policy change beforehand.

North Korean state TV anchors would blush at the fervor with which Fox’s hosts announced their support for the move on their programs that night.

“We begin with the art of the deal -- told you this was going to happen,” Fox host and Trump political operative Sean Hannity crowed at the top of his show. “It was inevitable. Donald Trump's in a perpetual state of negotiation. A huge win for the president. A huge win for the country. His biggest accomplishment of the second term and there have been many.”

:{Video

Citation

From the April 9, 2025, edition of Fox News' Hannity

Laura Ingraham trumpeted the tariff shift as “Trump’s 3D chess move,” claiming that the president was “on a roll” and “thinking three steps ahead” while his “naysayers” were left “grasping at straws.”

“Trump created maximum leverage for himself, and now his team’s sitting pretty, taking meetings and doing deals that put America first. And if we don't like how the negotiation is going, our partners have seen the kind of pain we can cause, and they're motivated to do what we want, or else we'll make them feel the same pain,” offered Jesse Watters.

Their narrative that Trump is cooly executing a deliberate plan is total nonsense — he was responding to “a mass sale of bonds” the night before which indicated that “people are losing confidence in the U.S. economy” and could have triggered a financial crisis, as Fox Business’ own senior correspondent Charlie Gasparino reported earlier that day.

“I want to tell you right now that Donald Trump outsmarted the world,” Gasparino said on Fox after Trump’s announcement. “Trust me. I'm an American, I support my president. But that's not really what happened here from what I understand.”

“It's the bond market and the sort of lending markets that's the plumbing of the economy. And those markets were imploding last night and that's why we have a 90-day freeze,” he explained.

“It is the White House who capitulated, based on everything I hear, and all of my sources,” Gasparino reported in a second segment. “And the reason why is because of the bond market and what happened last night.”

IFrame Content

Gasparino’s reporting is consistent with that from outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN.

Indeed, Trump himself publicly acknowledged on Wednesday afternoon that his reversal came because people “were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid,” and in particular were “queasy” over the bond market.

That reality is apparently toxic for Fox’s Trump shills.

When Watters’ Democratic co-host Jessica Tarlov pointed to the bond market gyrations on Wednesday’s edition of The Five, he told her, “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. You don’t even know what a bond is.”

Likewise, Hannity mocked the “stupid people” who deny that “this was the [Trump’s] plan all along,” which he claimed to have “pretty much understood because I know the guy so well.”

Rather than a brilliant plan carefully executed, we are left with a trade agenda that has unclear goals, will cripple small businesses, and will raise prices for American consumers on everything from coffee to cars — and could change at any time based on the whims of one mercurial man.

But that man is the focus of Fox’s cult, and so its high priests are genuflecting and offering sacrifices.

:{many vids?]

---

  1. ### Fox Business guest on results of Trump's tariffs: “The damage is done”

04/10/25 11:41 AM EDT

  1. ### Steve Bannon suggests the Trump administration “immediately revoke” all Chinese student visas

04/10/25 11:36 AM EDT

  1. ### Fox News keeps misleadingly telling its viewers Trump isn't a threat to Medicaid. A new poll helps to explain why.

04/10/25 11:04 AM EDT

  1. ### Fox host on White House capitulation on tariffs: “This is the art of the deal. This shows how strong our president is.”

04/10/25 9:33 AM EDT

  1. ### Newsmax's Greg Kelly says it's “totally legitimate” for Trump direct DOJ to investigate specific individuals

04/10/25 9:26 AM EDT

  1. ### Jesse Watters: “We didn't want to kill Barack Obama, we just didn't think he was legally qualified to be president because of where he was born”

04/09/25 6:28 PM EDT

  1. ### Jesse Watters interrupts and insults co-host describing the destructive repercussions of Trump’s trade policy

04/09/25 5:57 PM EDT

  1. ### As Trump and Fox cite the bond market for the pause of some tariffs, Sean Hannity mocks “stupid people” who deny that “this was the plan all along”

04/09/25 5:01 PM EDT

  1. ### Charlie Gasparino: “It is the White House who capitulated”

04/09/25 4:39 PM EDT

---

---

an 4 25

President Donald Trump is known for being a voracious consumer of Fox News and its sister channel Fox Business, keeping the right-wing cable news outlets on constantly whether he's inside the White House or at Mar-a-Lago. And according to according to Mediaite's David Gilmour, that habit may have inspired a major decision on a key economic policy.

As the stock market continued to plummet, Trump made a major announcement on Wednesday afternoon, April 9: He is pausing most non-China tariffs for 90 days. Stocks increased in value following the announcement, although a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety remains on Wall Street.

Earlier in the day, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon appeared on Fox Business and told host Maria Bartiromo that the United States would "probably" or "likely" go into a recession thanks to Trump's steep new tariffs. And according to Mediaite's David Gilmour, that interview "may have been the nudge" that Trump "needed to take the leap on his stunning tariffs pause."

READ MORE: GOP’s defense of 'Dear Leader' Trump’s 'idiocy' resembles famous suicide cult: analysis

Gilmour explains, "One source noted to the Wall Street Journal that while Dimon's appearance on 'Mornings With Maria' had been scheduled some time ago, the banker 'knew that Trump and his inner circle often watched Fox' and that his message would likely get through to them…. The point certainly registered with one viewer, the president, who apparently took note and directly cited Dimon’s interview with Bartiromo during a press gaggle at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, after announcing the tariffs pause."

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

Gilmour adds, "When a reporter asked whether it was changes in the bond markets that had persuaded him to 'reverse course,' Trump replied that he had noted on Tuesday that 'people were getting a little queasy.'"

The Mediaite journalist notes that another reporter asked Trump, "Mr. President, did anyone influence your decision? Did you speak with anyone you know? Jamie Dimon? Did you speak with anyone?'"

Trump responded, "I watched Jamie Dimon and Maria Bartiromo’s show this morning, and he was very good." And the "Dimon message," according to Gilmour, "may have nudged Trump to take the leap on a pause he claims he'd been considering for some days."

READ MORE:Donald Trump has an addiction: WSJ

---

mma more toadyism on tariffs

Ben Shapiro says Peter Navarro “should be nowhere near trade policy”

04/09/25 12:31 PM EDT

  1. ### Benny Johnson: “It's not really about your 401(k). OK? I'm taking a battering just like everybody else.”

04/09/25 12:19 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox flails to defend Trump's mass deportations, lack of due process

04/09/25 11:59 AM EDT

  1. ### Newsmax host says US elections are “a huge liability. It weakens our country in a lot of ways because we're always thinking about the next election”

04/09/25 9:26 AM EDT

  1. ### Jeanine Pirro: “These tariffs are literally a transition to the golden age”

04/08/25 5:52 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox host on 80-something losing retirement savings: “Imagine if" Trump's tariff plan "does work and it comes back in a huge way”

04/08/25

---

Benny Johnson calls Amy Coney Barrett a “repulsive lizard” and a “sick witch”

04/08/25 1:38 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox Business host ridicules “Peter Navarro and his reciprocal trade–girl math that's kneecapping the United States”

04/08/25 12:36 PM EDT

  1. ### Another key pillar of the MAGA defense for Signalgate is crumbling

04/08/25 12:21 PM EDT

  1. ### Heritage Foundation economist argues Trump should get Nobel Peace Prize for tariffs

04/08/25 12:09 PM EDT

---

Heritage Foundation economist argues Trump should get Nobel Peace Prize for tariffs

Stephen Moore on Fox: “If this keeps up, as I said in The Wall Street Journal today, he might win a Nobel Peace Prize if he's able to pull this off”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 04/08/25 MMA

Video file

Citation

From the April 8, 2025, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom

JOHN ROBERTS (ANCHOR): Well, in fact, China said, in a quote the Chinese commerce ministry said, "China will fight until the end if the U.S. side is bent on going down the wrong path." But you know what the president said in recent days? He said the first countries that come and make a deal, they're going to do really well. The last country to come to make a deal, they're not going to do very well. It looks, at this point, as though that last country is going to be China.

STEPHEN MOORE (Guest): You know, I mean, this is so amazing how -- I just get amazed by Trump by what a great negotiator he is. So, he is basically putting pressure on these countries whether its Germany, France, or Spain, or Italy, or Canada, or Mexico, you better make that call. You want to be first. Because it's almost like a game of musical chairs. Right? You don't want to be the one left standing and that's why I think you are seeing these flurries of calls. Now look, the devil is in the details. We don't know exactly what is being negotiated, we don't know what they are offering. But hopefully, it is that they are going to lower their tariffs on America. And John, I have said many times on your show, I'm a free trade guy, I'm not a big fan of tariffs. But if he can -- if Donald Trump can pull this off and get these countries to reduce their tariffs, it's good for everybody. The world economy will be better. My gosh, If this keeps up, as I said in The Wall Street Journal today, he might win a Nobel Peace Prize if he's able to pull this off.

ROBERTS: Is there a Nobel Prize in trade? I don't know maybe he'd be up for that.

===

  1. ### Sean Hannity questions the “stomach” of caller to his radio show scared about the economy

04/07/25 7:22 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox news chyron: “Trump's manly tariffs”

04/07/25 6:31 PM EDT

  1. ### Jesse Watters mocks himself for defending Trump's golf outing with the economy in turmoil

04/07/25 5:34 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox's Will Cain tells audience “what's happened on Wall Street doesn't necessarily hurt you”

04/07/25 5:30 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox vs. Fox: Trump apologists defend tariff chaos while experts raise alarm

04/07/25 5:10 PM EDT

  1. ### Charlie Gasparino: “We may be in a recession”

04/07/25 4:56 PM EDT

  1. ### On Bloomberg, economist Betsey Stevenson shreds Trump's tariff war: “Calling them reciprocal tariffs is completely misleading”

04/07/25 4:49 PM EDT

  1. ### Daily Wire's Matt Walsh: “Men are generally not attracted to ambitious career-driven women”

04/07/25

---

mma

CBS News reporting on immigrants deported to foreign megaprison blows up Fox’s “worst of the worst” spin

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 04/07/25

Fox News’ stable of pro-Trump propagandists have assured their viewers that the president was justified in deporting hundreds of immigrants to an El Salvadoran prison notorious for abuse because the deportees were “the most dangerous illegals” and “the worst of the worst.”

They credulously adopted the administration’s talking points, even as family members of deportees came forward to say that they were not criminals. But when CBS News actually did the legwork, its reporters found that the overwhelming majority of deportees had no record of committing violent crimes.

CBS obtained the names of 238 Venezuelan immigrants the Trump administration had claimed were members of the violent Tren de Aragua gang and deported last month under a rarely used wartime authority for imprisonment in El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center. The network “cross referenced that [list] with domestic and international court filings, news reports and arrest records whenever we could find them” and “found that an overwhelming majority have no apparent criminal convictions or even criminal charges.”

From Sunday’s report:

At least 22% of the men on the list have criminal records here in the United States or abroad. The vast majority are for non-violent offenses like theft, shoplifting and trespassing. About a dozen are accused of murder, rape, assault and kidnapping.

For 3% of those deported, it is unclear whether a criminal record exists.

But we could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans - 179 men- now sitting in prison.

Those facts stand in sharp contrast to the claims of the administration — and those of the Fox personalities who regurgitated its talking points to their viewers -- used to push back on critics who pointed out that some had been sent in error to a brutal foreign megaprison.

Citation

Fox News screenshots

Fox host Laura Ingraham said that the deportees were “the most dangerous illegals.”

On The Five, Jesse Watters called them “illegal alien gangbangers,” while Greg Gutfeld described them as “the criminal element” and “thugs.”

Contributor Lisa Kennedy Montgomery alleged that they were “people who want to hurt, maim, and kill innocent Americans.”

Anchor Sandra Smith and contributor Liz Peek both called them “the worst of the worst.”

Fox & Friends’ Ainsley Earhardt said they were “alleged gang members” who “did something wrong,” while for Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, they were “terrorist-like people.”

For some, like Fox & Friends co-hosts Lawrence Jones and Brian Kilmeade, the purportedly obvious criminality of the deportees justified removing them from the country without due process.

All of them, apparently eager to believe whatever they were told, were willing to accept the administration’s claims without scrutiny. Their response likely emboldened Trump, who on Sunday endorsed the idea that American citizens could also be sent to the El Salvadoran prison.

And don’t expect Fox figures to change their tune following the CBS report — as of Monday morning, they were still uncritically adopting the administration’s spin.

//

  1. ### Fox keeps calling migrants sent to El Salvador prison “criminals” and “terrorists” despite reporting that several deportees were likely falsely accused

04/01/25 1:11 PM EDT

  1. ### How Fox is handling reports that the Trump administration may have erroneously sent people to a foreign torture prison

04/01/25 1:24 PM EDT

  1. ### Right-wing media have decided undocumented migrants don't have the right to due process under the law

03/28/25

---

MAGA media distort decades-old clips of Democrats to distract from Trump's tariff chaos

The president’s apologists are trying to excuse Trump's global trade war by highlighting clips of Democrats criticizing Chinese trade practices dating back to the '90s

Written by Zachary Pleat

Published 04/04/25 mma

Following global stock market turmoil from Trump’s April 2 announcement of bogus tariff rates that amount to one of the biggest tax hikes in U.S. history, right-wing media are attempting to distract from Trump’s ruinous trade policy by re-airing decades-old clips of Democratic politicians criticizing China. Trump's right-wing apologists are distorting the context of these nearly 30-year-old arguments to pretend that they apply to the current international economic order or have anything to do with Trump’s haphazard lurch into a global trade war.

In reality, Trump’s trade war isn’t even against China; it’s being waged against the entire world in a purported effort to revive jobs that simply no longer exist in the United States. Regardless of the arguments that were made in the 1990s, “you can’t put the genie back in the bottle” in 2025.

---

mma

Sean Hannity claims clips of outraged constituents at GOP town halls are “fake videos”

03/21/25

===

---

MMA

  1. ### Fox's Greg Gutfeld calls labor unions the “real oligarchies”

:{03/21/25

  1. ### Fox Business attacks media for not supporting Trump’s unpopular tariff policies

03/21/25 3:13 PM EDT

  1. ### Charlie Kirk says he wants to work with the Trump administration to limit childhood vaccines

03/21/25 2:22 PM EDT

  1. ### Right-leaning online shows disproportionately reach a variety of audiences and shape political discourse and public perception

:{03/21/25

  1. ### Fox & Friends hosts mock concerns over due process for deported migrants: “We're going to do vetting when we deport but we're not going to do any vetting when they come across the border?”

03/21/25 12:13 PM EDT

  1. ### Newsmax guest suggests privatizing Social Security for younger Americans

03/21/25 11:02 AM EDT

  1. ### Media Matters weekly newsletter, March 21

03/21/25 10:45 AM EDT

  1. ### Right-wing media figures are lambasting John Roberts for rebuking Trump’s calls to impeach judges who rule against him

03/21/25 8:07 AM EDT

  1. ### On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains how the right-wing media will use Department of Education cuts to push for privatization of other federal services

:{03/20/25

  1. ### Murdoch v. Murdoch: Fox News goes to bat for the president while NY Post and WSJ urge caution and rule of law

03/20/25

---

mma

Trump's tariffs drive a wedge inside of Fox News

Many Fox personalities have supported Trump’s tariff agenda, while others warn his policies will harm American consumers

Written by Zachary Pleat

Research contributions from Chloe Simon & Jack Wheatley

:{Published 03/14/25

Fox News and Fox Business personalities have been broadly supportive of President Donald Trump's haphazard and often contradictory tariff policies, but a divide is emerging on air between the hosts and guests backing the president's ever-changing agenda and those acknowledging the economic disruptions these policies are already unleashing.

The art of the deal”: Fox personalities repeatedly celebrated Trump’s erratic tariff rollout as expert negotiation

On Inauguration Day, Trump promised to impose 25% tariffs across-the-board on Canadian and Mexican imports beginning February 1. Those tariffs were then delayed until February 4, and then again until March 4. On March 5, Trump gave automakers a temporary carveout from the tariffs, and a day after that, temporarily exempted goods covered under his first-term United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement and delayed the tariffs (again) entirely until April 2. On January 26, Trump also threatened tariffs on Colombian imports after Colombia refused to accept military deportation flights, only to later back off and declare victory. And on March 12, Trump’s proposed 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports went into effect, triggering retaliatory actions from major American trading partners.

All along, many on Fox have praised Trump’s increasingly contradictory tariff announcements as a masterful negotiation tactic and “the art of the deal,” much like they did during the 2024 presidential campaign.

But many Fox personalities are embracing the mayhem caused by Trump’s incoherent tariff policies, suggesting that the damage is necessary for various broader goals.

//

Three ways MAGA media are responding to Trump's tariffs crashing the stock market

03/11/25 12:58 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox parrots Trump's “drug war” justification for Canada/Mexico tariffs, even as he weakened fentanyl smuggling enforcement

03/05/25 2:56 PM EST

  1. ### As Trump wrecks the economy, Fox News pivots to blaming Biden

03/04/25

---

colbert called out z on reframe of epa mission BS

mma

How Fox manufactured legitimacy for Zeldin’s destructive climate and environmental rollbacks

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Research contributions from Harrison Ray

Published 03/13/25

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has used his extensive appearances on Fox News and Fox Business to justify freezing environmental programs and slashing climate-related funding. A Media Matters analysis found that Zeldin has made at least 22 appearances on cable news since his confirmation on January 29, with 21 of those on Fox networks.

This pattern of strategic media appearances has enabled the Trump administration to reframe essential climate initiatives as corrupt and wasteful while avoiding substantive media scrutiny of its climate and environmental rollbacks, shielding it from the consequences of these harmful policy shifts. Moreover, Zeldin has used these appearances to create a feedback loop in which harmful narratives aimed at climate funding are repeatedly echoed by Fox personalities until they become conventional wisdom across the network.

Fox provided Zeldin a shield from scrutiny, echoing past Trump EPA media strategies}:

Zeldin used his Fox appearances to create a feedback loop in which these talking points were introduced, echoed by hosts, and then repeated in later segments — laundering false claims and misleading narratives into conventional wisdom spread across Fox networks.

At the same time, Fox hosts consistently failed to challenge Zeldin on policy rollbacks targeting key environmental protections. Despite appearing on Fox twice after the Supreme Court’s March 4 ruling weakening the Clean Water Act, Zeldin was never asked about how the decision could impact the EPA’s ability to regulate pollution. Similarly, Fox did not press Zeldin on reports that he urged the Trump administration to reconsider the endangerment finding, the EPA’s determination that “planet-warming greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare,” which forms the legal basis for regulating emissions.

This strategy doesn’t just obscure policy impacts — it actively misleads the public. By laundering misinformation through repetition and friendly framing, Fox creates an echo chamber in which attacks on climate programs are treated as fact while the real-world consequences of slashing climate funding are ignored, effectively shielding Zeldin from accountability for the full scope of his EPA agenda.

As the Trump administration advances its fossil fuel agenda, from gutting the Clean Water Act to dismantling the legal foundation for climate regulation, Fox's selective coverage ensures that the consequences of these policies remain hidden from public scrutiny — allowing the real impacts of these destructive environmental rollbacks to remain largely unexamined.

---

Fox News turns a blind eye as cancer research funding gets decimated by the Trump administration

The network apparently aired only 2 segments about NIH cuts that mentioned the impacts on cancer research funding in the month since they were announced

Written by Harrison Ray

Research contributions from Rob Savillo

Published 03/13/25 mma

The Trump administration's recent attacks on the NIH have resulted in significant funding cuts, severely impacting cancer research across the country. The cuts include a drastic reduction in the reimbursement rate for indirect costs from an average of 27-28% to a proposed cap of 15%, potentially leading to billions of dollars in losses for research institutions. The funding cuts are affecting a wide range of programs, including precision therapy, quality of life studies, artificial intelligence applications in cancer research, and state clinical trial programs.

Experts warn that these funding reductions could have severe consequences for cancer research and patient care. Some researchers fear that the cuts will lead to delayed discoveries, stalled clinical trials, and a potential exodus of talented scientists from the field, ultimately hindering progress in developing lifesaving treatments for cancer patients.

Pediatric cancer research, which already receives less than 4% of all federal funds for cancer research, is particularly sensitive to these cuts:

Many universities rely on NIH reimbursements to maintain the kind of high-tech facilities and highly trained staff that are necessary to conduct clinical trials and other forms of medical research. Pediatric cancer research, in particular, is often expensive due to the relative rarity of many childhood cancers, the smaller number of patients able to participate in trials, and the need for specialized equipment capable of accommodating the physiology of small children.

“The proposed NIH funding cuts pose a significant threat to the future of pediatric cancer research and could severely impact the progress of life-saving treatments,” Danielle Fragalla, the Chief Executive Officer of Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation, said. “With research institutions facing multi-billion-dollar losses, the ability to fund new and ongoing studies–including those focused on childhood cancer, survivorship, and equitable care–could be drastically reduced.”

Of the 2 segments about NIH funding cuts that mention cancer research, 1 came from the network's left-leaning co-host of The Five, Jessica Tarlov, and the other came from a flippant comment by Fox host Brian Kilmeade in a segment obfuscating the topic. Tarlov was also responsible for one of the other three passing mentions about the funding.

---

mma

Right-wing media cheer Trump administration’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil

The Trump team is trying to deport a permanent resident of the United States and revoke his green card, and right-wing media are celebrating the effort

Written by Gideon Taaffe & Jack Winstanley

Published 03/13/25

Legal resident Mahmoud Khalil was arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement following his activism for Gaza at Columbia University, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a story about him online, writing, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported."

Such arrests are a policy goal of the Heritage Foundation and Khalil's arrest reportedly followed some online targeting of him. Right-wing media have responded to his arrest by calling for more arrests and deportations, arguing that the administration needs to “send a message” and that students are “going to lose."

ICE arrested Khalil after the Trump administration cracked down on college protests

//

  1. ### Pro-Palestinian student protests have been largely peaceful. Right-wing media want to call in the National Guard.

04/25/24

  1. ### Far-right media figures with extreme ties are planning a “United for Israel” march at Columbia to counter peaceful pro-Palestinian student protests

04/24/24

  1. ### Right-wing media equate Palestinian flag with Nazism and support for Hamas

12/14/23

---

sorta random on trump slump mma

  1. ### Sean Hannity downplays stock market upheaval and then blames the “Biden-Harris economy”

03/11/25 4:45 PM EDT

  1. ### “I’m not worried about this at all”: MAGA media shrug off concerns of recession

03/11/25 3:38 PM EDT

  1. ### Daily Wire host says “Trump is wrong” to attack Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY)

03/11/25 2:42 PM EDT

  1. ### “You need to cut Medicaid”: Right-wing pundits call to gut health coverage for the poor

03/11/25 1:37 PM EDT

  1. ### Larry Kudlow: Why shouldn't the President “be able to impound on behalf of the taxpayers?”

03/11/25 1:11 PM EDT

  1. ### Three ways MAGA media are responding to Trump's tariffs crashing the stock market

03/11/25 12:58 PM EDT

  1. ### Benny Johnson: “There's gonna be some turmoil, some ups and downs, as we exorcise the demons out of this economy”

03/11/25 12:21 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox News outstripped CNN and MSNBC in first month covering Trump's anti-trans executive orders

03/11/25 12:02 PM EDT

  1. ### Newsmax host: “Perhaps stocks need to take a nosedive so the working man can get a little relief from all of this inflation”

03/11/25 9:06 AM EDT

  1. ### Larry Kudlow: “I don’t think there’s a strong recession case to be made”

03/10/25

---

MMA

As Trump wrecks the economy, Fox News pivots to blaming Biden

Fox personalities are blaming worsening economic indicators on the previous administration to absolve Trump of responsibility

Written by Zachary Pleat & Craig Harrington

Research contributions from Lis Power

Published 03/04/25

Even though President Donald Trump’s administration has taken multiple actions that have effectively weakened the economy, Fox News is helping Trump prepare to place the blame for worsening economic indicators on former President Joe Biden, who handed off a strong and stable economy to Trump less than two months ago.

Trump reportedly plans to blame Biden for his own economic turmoil

---

random mma

Ben Shapiro says Trump's pause of military aid to Ukraine “is not a particularly good move”

03/04/25 1:47 PM EST

Ben Shapiro: “The tariffs are in fact a tax on American consumers. They drive up the prices.”

03/04/25 1:28 PM EST

Right-wing media lay foundations for Republican cuts to Medicaid

03/04/25 12:33 PM EST

War Room correspondent: “It's the reality of this world” that Trump's tariffs may cause “temporary pains for the consumer lives”

03/04/25 11:44 AM EST

Fox interviews car dealer about Trump tariffs: “We're afraid. It's going to have a gigantic impact on our business.”

03/04/25 11:39 AM EST

CNBC's Joe Kernen mocks media “hyperventilating” about turmoil caused by Trump's policies

03/04/25 11:15 AM EST

Fox Business guest: “These tariffs are really scary ... it has a real possibility of bringing on a recession”

03/04/25 11:03 AM EST

Fox host on Trump's tariffs: “There might be some pain in the beginning, but ultimately this is to help all of us”

03/04/25 10:45 AM EST

Fox host Brian Kilmeade shocked by co-hosts' suggestion that Starlink could be shut off for Ukraine: “You are saying Zelensky is worse than Putin”

03/04/25 10:01 AM EST

Fox's Greg Gutfeld: Zelensky “had it coming, he’s a criminal and he deserved it”

03/03/25

---

an 3 25 thom 3

— Crazy Alert! Proof Trump runs Fox-So-Called-News. After Trump’s Cabinet Ass-Kissing Session in the White House this week, embarrassing in its North Korea-like obsequiousness, the president turned to a Fox “News” host and, apparently not realizing his mic was hot, demanded that he say the meeting was “Unbelievable” in its greatness. Pathetic doesn’t begin to describe how low we’ve fallen…

===

Right-wing media cheer Trump's anti-Christian bias task force after years of laying the groundwork

Right-wing commentators have spent years claiming that the Biden administration was “waging spiritual warfare against Christianity” and that “the left wants to drive Christians out of the public square”

Written by Payton Armstrong

Published 02/27/25 mma

A task force created by President Donald Trump to eradicate alleged “anti-Christian bias” is drawing praise from right-wing media figures — some of whom have spent years baselessly claiming that Christians are a persecuted group in the United States, even though experts say there’s no such widespread bias.

Right-wing commentators celebrated Trump’s task force as “a cultural resurgency” and declared that “this is the counter-revolution against their color revolution that occurred in the summer of 2020.”

In one instance, Christian nationalist media figure Lance Wallnau joined Steve Bannon’s podcast to praise the task force as the first step in the “recapturing of institutions,” naming education, media, business, and government among the institutions he wants to infuse with “the ideas of Western civilization, which is the ideas of Christian civilization.” This appears to be a reference to the Seven Mountain Mandate popularized by Wallnau, which instructs Christians to impose fundamentalist values on American society by conquering the “seven mountains” of cultural influence in American life: government, education, media, religion, family, business, and entertainment.

Experts have argued “there is no widespread anti-Christian bias in our society" and that Trump’s anti-Christian bias task force is actually “enshrining Christian privilege in our society.”

Trump issued an executive order on “eradicating anti-Christian bias,” but experts say “there is no widespread anti-Christian bias in our society”

The Associated Press reported that “critics said Trump is claiming to see persecution in distorted case descriptions, a calendar coincidence and other situations that, while raising concerns, don’t add up to a pattern.”As noted by the Associated Press, “Christianity is by far the largest faith in America, and Christian conservatives have a strong grip on the levers of government.”}: The Associated Press, [2/13/25]|

* When Transgender Day of Visibility coincided with Easter in 2024, right-wing media figures — especially on Fox News and Newsmax — claimed that the Biden administration was attacking Christians.Right-wing media used the day to warn Christians that they were under attack after Biden’s statements recognizing Transgender Day of Visibility, with Fox’s Jesse Watters arguing that Biden is “waging spiritual warfare against Christianity.” Between Fox and Newsmax, the networks combined aired more than 4 hours of coverage and nearly 80 segments, slamming Biden for his “demonic” remarks which they said amounted to an “attack on Christian faith.” Media Matters, [4/2/24, 4/2/24]

Carlson again falsely claimed that Vaughn was facing felony charges “from the Biden administration for praying at an abortion clinic and daring to sing hymns,” adding that “from the perspective of the people who run the country there’s really just one enemy, and that’s faithful Christians.”During a Tucker Carlson Uncensored clip posted on X, Carlson said: “If you’re interested in who they really hate, well, look at what's happening. So Christian churches across the country have been burning and no one in the government is doing anything about it}:. Look at how Christian churches were treated during Covid … we talked the other day to a guy who is facing 11 years in prison, federal felony charges from the Biden administration, for praying at an abortion clinic and daring to sing hymns. So if you are a faithful Christian — not a fake Christian, David French Christian, but an actual Christian, of the kind this country has always had, of the kind this country was created to harbor actually — you are seen as an enemy by the people who run it.” Twitter/X, [4/18/24]|

Fox host Laura Ingraham repeatedly lamented the supposed anti-Christian bias of the Biden administration, including in an interview with Vaughn where she suggested that “singing hymns and peacefully expressing your traditional Christian beliefs can get you thrown behind bars.” During the interview, Ingraham’s show displayed a chyron that read: “Liberals fighting to wipe out Christian values.}:” FoxNews.com, [1/31/24]|

Following a deadly shooting at a Christian private school in Nashville, Tennessee, Ingraham claimed the Biden White House and “the left” had been “ginning up anti-Christian sentiment” by allegedly teaching kids “to treat Christians as haters and mortal threats to their existence.”Ingraham told her audience: “Isn’t it also the case that the left in America — and even this White House — is ginning up, without saying the words necessarily, but ginning up anti-Christian sentiment by referring to trans activists as heroes and their bravery for standing up against the intolerant class, the haters. So these kids are learning to treat Christians as haters and mortal threats to their existence.”}: Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [4/11/23; Media Matters, 4/12/23]|

Sean Davis, CEO of The Federalist,}: argued that by charging anti-abortion protesters under the FACE ACT, “the Biden regime clearly desires to make being a pro-life Christian a crime.” As documented by Media Matters, anti-abortion figures baselessly accused the Biden Department of Justice of weaponizing the FACE Act against protestors convicted of harassment at abortion clinics. Twitter/X, [6/21/24; Media Matters, 6/11/24]|

While hosting Jack Phillips — a Colorado baker who had been sued for refusing to make a trans-themed cake — Fox’s Laura Ingraham declared that “the left wants to drive Christians out of the public square.”}:Ingraham added: “You don't even have a right to have a small business if you're a Christian today. You certainly don't have any conscience right, you have no religious rights, you have no First Amendment rights, if you clash with what they believe to be, you know, the supremely protected among us.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [1/30/23; Associated Press, 10/8/24]|

Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk has relentlessly claimed that Christian values in the U.S. are under attack, claiming that they could be thrown in prison.}:At a 2023 TPUSA pastor’s summit, Kirk warned pastors that “if we continue theological disputes and don't focus on liberty, then we're going to be having those theological disputes from prison.” Ahead of the 2024 election, Kirk claimed that pro-choice Democrats would “create a secret police that will audit, intimidate, raid every single” pregnancy center in the U.S., saying that when that happens, “we'll be like, wow, I really wish that we Christians would have bought ourselves a little more time so that our nonprofits, our leaders, wouldn't go to federal prison.” NPR, [10/24/24; Media Matters, 4/27/23; Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, 8/16/24]|

Tucker Carlson suggested that the “trans movement is targeting Christians,” citing the Covenant school shooting.Carlson claimed that “the trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity and therefore its natural enemy,” d}:eclaring that “Christianity and transgender orthodoxy” are on a “collision course” and claiming that “one side is likely to draw blood before the other side.” Rolling Stone, [3/28/23]|

On Fox News, Oklahoma state superintendent Ryan Walters lamented that a Harris/Walz administration would “trans the kids“ and “push all faith out of the public square,” as now-White House faith director Paula White-Cain bragged that Trump was “promising in his second term to do even more for Christians as he shares the same values.”White-Cain called for national “revival” and “turning our hearts back to God” and Walters declared that a Harris/Walz administration would be the “most anti-Christian administration in American history.”}: FoxNews.com, [8/10/24; Religion News Service, 2/21/25]|

On Sebastian Gorka’s Salem Media podcast, Breitbart’s}: Thomas Williams said that the U.S. is a “post-Christian society, but in many ways an anti-Christian society.”Gorka — who is now the counterterrorism chief in Trump’s administration — replied, “right,” and Williams added, “We are a Judeo-Christian nation by its foundation, and in the value system that understands what the family is, what society is.” Salem Media, *America First with Sebastian Gorka*, [6/14/23; CBS News, 1/7/25]|

* Fox host Emily Compagno labeled the U.S. an “anti-Christian, anti-Judeo-Christian society.”Compagno cited backlash to a graduation speech from Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker that reportedly attacked the LGBTQ community and told “women to forget about a career and serve their man instead.” Fox News, *Gutfeld!*, [6/11/24; OutSports, 5/13/24]

Former Trump DOJ official Jeff Clark told Bannon that a second Trump administration needed a “beefed up” religious liberty task force to fight anti-Christian sentiment in the U.S., citing a story he heard about a “school district that was prohibiting bus drivers even from wearing Christmas regalia.” }:Responding to a campaign speech where Trump pledged to create an anti-Christian bias task force if elected, Clark said: “That's wonderful to announce, especially in an increasingly anti-Christian world. I mean, I'd seen a story about a school district that was prohibiting bus drivers even from wearing Christmas regalia to entertain the students a little bit. I mean things have gone into bonkers land. And look, in the first Trump term, we did have a religious liberty task force. And I think we need an even more beefed up one.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [12/20/23; Fox News, 12/19/23]|

Steve Bannon celebrated the announcement and hosted media figure Lance Wallnau —}: a “prophet” and self-described Christian nationalist — with the two discussing right-wing Christians’ “recapturing of institutions” including “education, of media, of business, of government.”Bannon and Wallnau discussed how the task force can be used “to seize the institutions of the federal government” with “the ideas of Western civilization, which is the ideas of Christian civilization.” Wallnau said that “there are three arteries that make this happen: legislation, litigation, and the shaping of public opinion,” adding, “because people like you, as long as we can shape the public opinion, the secret sauce is you've got to work with the awakening that's happening and move with it in such a way that you litigate and you legislate, but never get too far ahead of public persuasion.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [2/7/25; Media Matters; 9/27/24; Rolling Stone, 9/29/22]|

Video

Citation

From the February 7, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Fox host Jeanine Pirro praised the task force’s creation}: and attacked the FBI and the Biden administration for supposedly targeting Catholics, a claim that was found to be baseless after an internal investigation.Pirro noted that Trump “went to two prayer breakfasts this morning and he talked about eradicating anti-Christian bias,” and complained about “when the FBI director Christopher Wray came out and really told us no one at the FBI was targeting Christians and Senator Hawley came out and they found that leaked memo that the FBI was investigating Catholics and priests were gone to so they could then inform on parishioners who were considered domestic terrorists.” The New York Times reported that “Republicans claimed the bureau’s memo was evidence of an anti-conservative strain among F.B.I. ranks, but an internal investigation failed to uncover any ‘malicious intent.’” Fox News, *The Five*, [2/6/25; New York Times, 4/18/24]|

//

  1. ### Trump and his MAGA allies increasingly embrace extreme prophetic media

05/30/24

  1. ### Trump scheduled to address right-wing media “prophets” and pastors who claim he’s “anointed to be King”

10/18/24

  1. ### Oklahoma state superintendent says pastor and right-wing commentator suggested his new Bible mandate in public schools

07/08/24

---

MMA

  1. ### Fox Business suggests Trump creating a recession could be a good thing

02/26/25

  1. ### Trump warned of a “bloodbath” in the auto industry if he wasn't elected. The Wall Street Journal points out that he's now engineering one.

02/26/25

---

mma

Fox touted Trump's campaign promise to quickly lower prices. Now both Fox and Trump are backtracking as prices increase.

Written by Zachary Pleat

Research contributions from Casey Wexler & Pete Tsipis

Published 02/25/25

Donald Trump’s supporters in right-wing media, particularly at Fox News, repeatedly hyped his oft-repeated campaign promise to quickly bring down consumer prices, and especially the cost of groceries, if he was reelected.

These promises included immediate price decreases, with Trump saying during the campaign, “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on day one,” and, “Prices will come down. … They’ll come down fast.”

But after Trump took office, prices not only didn’t come down, they continued rising for many people and businesses. News organizations swiftly contrasted Trump’s lofty promises of immediate relief with the reality that he hasn’t been keeping those promises. The Trump administration’s illegal impoundment of congressionally authorized spending and his announcements of universal tariffs, nation-specific tariffs, and product-specific tariffs are already leading to higher costs and price hikes for Americans and are reportedly leading consumers to expect further price increases.

And as Trump’s inflationary policies begin to take effect, both the Trump administration and Fox figures have begun providing excuses for why Trump failed in his promise to “immediately bring prices down.”

Fox repeatedly promoted Trump’s promise of lower prices if he was reelected

---

MMA

Trump’s move to curtail NYC congestion pricing follows lobbying from the Murdoch media empire

Data show that congestion pricing was immediately successful, with reduced travel times and improved subway safety amid higher usage

Written by Zachary Pleat

:{Published 02/21/25

Following widespread criticism of New York City’s traffic congestion pricing policy from the right-wing Murdoch media empire, President Donald Trump moved to halt the program just weeks after it began. Even though data show that the policy had successfully improved travel times and increased public transit usage, Murdoch media outlets celebrated the Trump administration's intervention in New York municipal policies.

Data show that congestion pricing had positive effects, yet Trump acted to halt it anyway

Beginning on January 5, New York City implemented a long-planned toll program to ease congestion by requiring drivers to pay $9 to enter parts of Manhattan. Reuters reported that “transit officials say the program has cut commuting times and that inbound trip times on all Hudson River and East River crossings are now 10-30% faster or more, while bus service has also improved. Subway ridership also has grown since the toll was introduced.”

Manhattan-area newspaper amNewYork Metro also reported on data showing both higher and safer subway ridership since the congestion pricing policy went into effect:

NYC subway crime has dropped significantly so far this year even as ridership increased in the congestion pricing era, according to the newest NYPD data released on Tuesday.

In the first month of 2025, there were 147 reported crimes on the subway down from 231 last year—resulting in 36% fewer crimes committed on the rails this year.

At the same time, subway ridership has increased significantly since the start of congestion pricing on Jan. 5. This means that the drop in crime on the tracks has actually decreased even as more people are using NYC’s busy transit system—one of the largest in the world.

…

Between Jan. 6 and 28, an amNewYork Metro review of MTA data found, ridership was up more than 9.1 million commuters year-over-year (74,680,439 in 2025 vs. 65,569,613 in 2024), a 13.1% increase.

Traffic fatalities across the city are also down, the NYPD’s CompStat 2.0 dashboard shows. Year to date, there were 10 deadly collisions on the roads compared to 18 in 2024—an over 44% drop year over year.

The MTA, the state agency that runs the NYC trains and buses, had long touted that congestion pricing would bring more New Yorkers onto mass transit, thus relieving heavy traffic build up in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. So far, those predictions are being proven true.

On February 19, Trump posted on social media: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” That same day, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent a letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul asking to “discuss the orderly cessation of toll operations.” For her part, Hochul said that the traffic “cameras are staying on,” and New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority filed a lawsuit to block the Trump administration’s attempt to end the program.

Murdoch media spent months in the lead-up to implementation criticizing NYC congestion pricing

Despite the successes of the NYC policy, Murdoch media celebrated the Trump administration’s move to end congestion pricing

//

Murdoch empire conspires to blame Biden for Trump’s trickle-down tax cuts expiring

:{04/29/24

  1. ### Watch MSNBC's Chris Hayes explain Rupert Murdoch’s role in pushing Hunter Biden claims from informant indicted for lying

:{02/15/24

  1. ### As Rupert Murdoch steps down as the head of Fox, his destructive legacy remains

11/17/23

==

MMA

Fox News repeatedly misled viewers about the financial impact of Trump’s latest executive order targeting immigrants

Fox conflated benefits for authorized immigrants and American children with money spent on “illegal migrants”

Written by Torri Lonergan & Emma Mae Weber

Research contributions from Ben Van Bloem

Published 02/21/25

In reporting on President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at ending aid to so-called “illegal aliens,” Fox News repeatedly touted Congressional Budget Office data estimating that the U.S. government would spend $177 billion by 2034 on immigrants and their children, inaccurately describing it as spending on “illegal migrants.” In reality, that data covers spending on both immigrants with legal status and undocumented immigrants, as well as their American children, and the CBO also estimates a net positive financial impact from immigration.

Trump signed a vague executive order cutting aid to immigrants

---

MMA

Key Trump officials appeared on Fox News 124 times in the first month of his presidency

Fox News persists as the administration's mouthpiece

Written by Harrison Ray

Research contributions from Media Matters Staff

Published 02/21/25

Trump's “border czar,” Thomas Homan, has been the most prominent administration official on the network, appearing 20 times in total, on over half of the days of the month. Counselor to the president Alina Habba (15 appearances), White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt (12), and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller (11) were also prominently featured.

Four of the 10 most-featured top officials were former Fox News employees: former contributor Homan, former Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth (6 appearances), former contributor Michael Waltz (6), and former network host Sean Duffy (5). (Trump has tapped many other former Fox News employees to be part of his second administration.)

President Donald Trump himself has also appeared on the network several times since inauguration, appearing 4 times in 2 multiepisode interviews on Hannity and 1 time on Special Report with Bret Baier.

Thomas Homan20
Alina Habba15
Karoline Leavitt12
Stephen Miller11
Kristi Noem8
Pete Hegseth6
Michael Waltz6
Donald Trump5
Sean Duffy5
Lee Zeldin5
Doug Burgum5
Peter Navarro4
Pam Bondi4
Brendan Carr4
J.D. Vance3
Scott Bessent2
Marco Rubio2
Chris Wright2
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.1
John Ratcliffe1
Howard Lutnick1
Doug Collins1
Brooke Rollins1
TOTAL124
Hannity25
The Ingraham Angle14
Fox & Friends14
The Story with Martha MacCallum11
America Reports11
America's Newsroom10
Jesse Watters Primetime8
Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo7
The Will Cain Show6
The Faulkner Focus4
Special Report with Bret Baier4
Fox News Sunday3
Fox & Friends Weekend2
The Big Weekend Show1
Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy1
Gutfeld!1
Fox Report with Jon Scott1
Fox & Friends First1
TOTAL124

===

MMA Charlie Kirk says 90% of federal jobs “should not exist”

02/24/25

  1. ### Charlie Kirk says government workers “operate as worthless parasites on the American taxpayer”

02/24/25

Fox host: Trump voters who are “casualties” of federal layoffs are just part of closing the budget gap

02/24/25

  1. ### Sean Hannity to caller pleading for the jobs of military vets in the federal government: “There will be other opportunities”

02/21/25

===

===

AN 2 25

Democrats often criticize Fox News and its sister channel Fox Business for conducting softball interviews with President Donald Trump and his allies.

But when Fox News' Howie Kurtz recently interviewed Jason Miller, a Trump senior adviser, he asked some tough questions and grilled him aggressively about Trump's foreign policy. And some MAGA Republicans are furious with Kurtz.

Kurtz asked Miller about Trump's recent attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who he described as a "dictator." Trump blamed Zelensky for the Ukraine-Russia War but didn't criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin.

READ MORE:[Revealed: Emboldened terrorists 'quickly rebuilding' as MAGA takes over the DOJ

Kurtz noted that Trump is being "hammered" by some on the right, including the National Review, for his anti-Zelenskyy comments, asking Miller, "How can you defend that?" And Miller was evasive in his response, carefully avoiding criticism of Trump.

Kurtz told Miller, "Conservative Mark Levin, who is a Fox News host, says this is sick: Ukraine didn't start this war. What were they supposed to do, roll over and play dead? They're just trying to survive. So you very skillfully have not answered the direct question, which is: why is President Trump blaming Zelenskyy for the beginning of the war?"

It didn't take some MAGA Republicans long to start attacking Kurtz, who was accused of "bias." One of them argued that Kurtz belonged on MSNBC, not Fox News.

One X user tweeted, "Your show sucked dude, I had to turn it. I thought I was watching CNN or MSDNC, my god."

READ MORE:[We've reached the moment of maximum peril for our nation and our freedoms

But Kurtz is standing by the interview with Miller, saying he's glad he asked the Trump senior adviser some tough questions.

In a February 23 post on X, formerly Twitter, Kurtz wrote, "The trolls are really out today with nasty insults. Jason Miller was fine with our interview. Trump is under fierce media criticism on a dozen fronts and that’s what we explored with a conservative and liberal panel."

READ MORE:['We are starting to worry': Economist sounds alarm on 'near-term downside' of 1 million DOGE layoffs

*Watch the full video at this Mediaite link.

===

MMA

  1. ### Sean Hannity: FBI agents that investigated Trump are “going to have to answer some tough questions”

02/20/25 4:25 PM EST

  1. ### Fox conflates benefits for authorized immigrants and American children with money spent on “illegal migrants”

02/20/25

---

MMA

The stars of Fox News have used their shows to defend President Donald Trump’s banning of Associated Press reporters from the Oval Office and Air Force One because the wire service refuses to adopt the administration’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” They’ve characterized the AP’s actions as “deadnaming” the Gulf and said that “the White House is right” to restrict its access in response.

But Fox has also reportedly signed on to a letter calling on the Trump White House to restore the AP’s access and characterizing the ban as “serious breach” of the First Amendment's protections for the press. So has Newsmax, whose on-air talent praised the White House response while attacking the “Fake News AP” as “Associated Propaganda.”

The disconnect demonstrates how Trumpist propaganda channels like Fox and Newsmax occasionally try to bolster their standing by play-acting as legitimate news channels which share the values of the free press, even as their on-air product plays to their right-wing viewership base.

Oliver Darcy reported Wednesday that “40 news organizations have signed onto a confidential letter circulated by the White House Correspondents’ Association supporting the AP,” including both legitimate news outlets and “the pro-Trump channels Fox News and Newsmax.”

Darcy published the letter, which said in part:

The First Amendment prohibits the government from asserting control over how news organizations make editorial decisions. Any attempt to punish journalists for those decisions is a serious breach of this Constitutional protection.

The decision to exclude The Associated Press from covering the president aboard Air Force One and in the Oval Office is an escalation of a dispute that does not serve the presidency or the public. News organizations must be free to make their own editorial decisions without fear of government intrusion.

...

We once again ask the White House to lift this ban on the AP immediately and to underscore its support for press freedom.

But that sort of defense of the First Amendment principles and repudiation of the Trump White House’s actions is a far cry from what the viewers of Fox and Newsmax have been hearing on those channels.

Indeed, the night before Darcy’s report, Fox star Jesse Watters said of the controversy on his prime-time show: “The Associated Press took Mexico's side. They're deadnaming the Gulf, so they got kicked out of the White House.”

Watters likewise said on his February 12 show, “The Associated Press is sticking with Mexico, and now they are banned from the Oval Office,” adding, “Kick them out. Kick them out, and kick some other people out while you're there. I have a list.”

Video

From the February 12, 2025, edition of Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime

Watters’ colleagues were similarly blithe about the prospect of the federal government reducing access to reporters due to the editorial decisions of their outlet.

“So-called journalists in the media mob are ramping up their petty anti-Trump reporting,” Jason Chaffetz offered while guest-hosting the February 14 edition of Hannity. “For example, The Associated Press is still refusing to refer to the Gulf of America by its new name, despite recognition from Google, Apple, and other major outlets.”

After reading a quote from a White House official who said the AP’s decision is “not just divisive, but it also exposes The Associated Press' commitment to misinformation,” he commented, “The White House is right.”

Chaffetz later asked Fox contributor Joe Concha for his view of the White House’s restrictions on the AP. “It’s the best unintentional comedy of the week, Jason, hearing how The Associated Press, because they haven't been permitted onto Air Force One, into the Oval Office, that's somehow a threat to free press and a chilling attack on the First Amendment,” Concha said.

Other Fox hosts focused on mocking former CNN anchor Jim Acosta’s call for the press corps to take collective action and stop attending events from which the AP was barred. Greg Gutfeld said on the Wednesday edition of his show that the press would “love any excuse not to cover all of Trump's wins” and commented, “Your scam is up, media, and trust me, the hits are going to keep coming.” And guest-hosting Friday’s edition of The Ingraham Angle, Charles Hurt said of Acosta’s remarks, “I think that this derangement syndrome is in full swing, not just in celebrity la-la land, but also among our press brethren.”

Special Report, the flagship “news” show hosted by Bret Baier, has not addressed the controversy according to a review of its transcripts in the Nexis database.

Likewise, Newsmax hosts Rob Schmitt, Rick Leventhal, and Ed Henry teamed up to mock the AP and any concerns over whether the White House had breached the First Amendment during the February 13 edition of Schmitt’s show.

Video

Citation

From the February 13, 2025, edition of Newsmax's Rob Schmitt Tonight

On-screen text castigated the “fake news AP” and called the outlet “Associated Propaganda” as Schmitt introduced the segment, blaming The Associated Press for “refusing to accept Gulf of America” and said that “the media has no right to be” in the Oval Office.

Henry, a former president of the WHCA, began his response by saying that he would not be a “hypocrite” and “always stand up for the First Amendment.” But he went on to criticize the AP on the grounds that “it’s called the Gulf of America,” adding, “If you are not going to follow the actual name of the body of water, then I can understand why they don't want to give you access. You’re not playing with the basic facts.”

Leventhal also criticized the AP, saying that “they are supposed to be free of bias and opinion” and that by refusing to adopt the Gulf of America moniker, “you're saying you don't agree with the president, you don't like what the president did, and you're not going to play by his rules. That is completely opposite of what The Associated Press is supposed to be.” He added: “You can't make those kinds of unilateral decisions. You report the news, Associated Press.”

“That's exactly right,” Schmitt replied.

---

MMA 2 25

Fox News has largely dodged reporting President Donald Trump’s February 15 declaration that he is above the law as long as he “saves his Country,” with much of the network’s sparse coverage focusing on how the president’s nakedly authoritarian statement triggered the libs.

When Trump posted, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” midday Saturday, the response was fierce. Trump’s remark — a quote “often attributed” to Napoleon Bonaparte, who overthrew France’s post-revolutionary republic and crowned himself emperor — followed calls from his allies to defy court rulings that strike down administration actions as illegal.

Numerous critics on the left and a handful on the right pointed out the danger inherent in Trump appearing to place himself above the law. MAGA influencers like Jack Posobiec (who recently received special access to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first overseas trip) cheered. “America will be saved,” the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theorist wrote. “What must be done will be done.”

It should go without saying that a similar remark from Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris would have triggered days if not weeks of apocalyptic coverage from Fox. But the right-wing propaganda network’s response to Trump’s comment has been notably muted, with only about 6 minutes of discussion through noon ET on Tuesday.

The bulk of Fox’s coverage — more than 4 and a half minutes — came from a Sunday segment on The Big Weekend Show in which anchor Griff Jenkins and his panel mocked Democrats and journalists for criticizing Trump’s statement.

Jenkins introduced the discussion by reading Trump’s quote and describing it as “the left’s latest ammunition for vilifying Trump.” Jenkins then aired a series of criticisms of the remark as a chyron read “left melts down over out-of-context Trump post,” before providing the purported missing context: “Trump said only days ago that he does in fact plan on abiding by the law.”

Video

Citation

From the February 16, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Big Weekend Show

Jenkins, having awarded the president credit for saying he would follow the law before saying that actions aren’t illegal if done to save the country, then added: “In fact, many people wonder if the ones not following the law are actually those on the left who have relentlessly gone after Trump over the past four years with questionable cases.”

The segment’s panelists celebrated Trump’s remark as a deliberate act of misdirection aimed at his political opposition.

“I am really grateful that President Trump did troll them on this, and I think he knew this was going to be their reaction,” offered Fox contributor Sara Carter.

Medical contributor Nicole Saphier added that Trump “puts up tweets like this because he knows that they are going to lose their mind. He has Democrats and left-wing media in such a tizzy.”

Fox prime-time host and Trump adviser Sean Hannity also responded by mocking Trump’s critics, tossing in a reference to the remark during a Monday recitation of purported instances of the media’s anti-Trump hysteria.

“It's like Nazi, fascist, racist, now it's Napoleon, now it's Margaret Brennan, now it's Saturday Night Live,” he moaned. “I mean, to be honest, it's like 10 years of this and they still haven't learned a thing.”

Fox contributor Andrew McCarthy offered a more cautious take on Monday’s edition of America’s Newsroom, suggesting that Trump’s comment could undermine his administration’s legal fights before the Supreme Court.

“Look, I think that some of the things the president said over the weekend about his, you know, authority, that — like, you don't violate the law if you are saving the country, and some of the stuff that has gone on with the Justice Department — I hope they haven't spooked the justices,” he said. “Because if you are going to ask the justices to uphold the law, you have to act like the law is important.”

But Trump’s remarks undermining the rule of law are not anomalous. He vowed during the campaign to act as a “dictator,” though only on “day one” of his presidency, and promised to unleash the Justice Department on his political enemies and journalistic foils. He has cited as his model the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban, a self-described practitioner of “illiberal democracy.” Trump regularly praises murderous authoritarian rulers like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, and even touted the “strength” China’s leaders deployed in violently suppressing the Tiananmen Square uprising.

And Trump’s actions suggest he means what he says: He regularly signaled during his first administration that he wanted law enforcement to act as an extension of his will, and now he has put that into practice in his second term.

Pushback from the Justice Department stymied his efforts to take authoritarian steps like prosecuting his political foes and overturning the 2020 election. But since he returned to the White House, Trump has issued mass pardons to the January 6 convicts who attacked law enforcement in a bid keep him in power; purged federal prosecutors and FBI leadership; and nominated his own former personal lawyers to lead the Justice Department and a sycophant with an enemies list for FBI director. His appointees have overseen an effort to dismiss corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for his support for Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts and an attempt to open a probe into a Biden-era contract, both of which triggered resignations from career prosecutors.

Trump has functionally ensured that his allies will remain beyond the reach of federal law enforcement for the next four years. What a troll!

---

fail fired nuke security, does not have info to recall

---

an 2 25

Trump’s Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, pushed a claim Monday on Fox News that there may be many dead people receiving Social Security payments. Experts have pushed back against that idea, which has come from Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, indicating that the numbers are off or misinterpreted.

“President Trump has directed Elon Musk and the DOGE team to identify fraud at the Social Security Administration. They haven’t dug into the books yet, but they suspect that there are tens of millions of deceased people who are receiving fraudulent Social Security payments,” she said.

“And so their goal in going into the Social Security Administration is to identify three things. Number one, to identify duplicate payments and to end them. Number two, to identify payments that are going to deceased people who are no longer living and should no longer be receiving that money, and number three, to protect the integrity of this system for hard working Americans who have been paying into it their entire lives.

READ MORE:Author details link between 'Christian nationalism' and MAGA’s 'smashing of the administrative state'

“There are maybe hundreds of deceased people receiving fraudulent benefits, not tens of millions. There are about 70 million people TOTAL receiving Social Security — does anyone really think one third+ of them are dead???” Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, posted on X.

Over the weekend, Musk posted a table supposedly showing that the Social Security database has millions of people in it over the age of 140.

“What's especially frustrating about Musk making it seem as if millions of Social Security checks might be going out to people aged 100+ is that we know how many Social Security checks went out in December to people aged 99+: 89,106,” journalist James Surowiecki posted on X. He added: “89,106 is, as it happens, fewer than the number of centenarians in the U.S., as estimated by the Census. So we are, again, not sending out billions in SS checks to people aged 130.”

Ninety-eight percent of social security number holders who are age 100 or older do not receive benefits, Justin Wolfers, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, explained on X. “Why are there dead people on (this one table of) the social security database? They died before the use of electronic death records,” he added.

READ MORE:'Time to think of Plan B': Musk ripped after forcing out Social Security chief

“Should government databases be cleaner? It's a cost-benefit question. Cost: $5-10m to clean out the old records Benefit: Only "limited benefit" because "almost none" of these records are receiving payments. This hardly feels like big potatoes, either way,” he explained.

At Wired, David Gilbert wrote: “Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure,” or the idea that 150-year-olds were collecting Social Security, “was not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written inCOBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.” He added: “COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.”

“Musk could also have simply looked up the SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped benefit paymentswhen anyone reaches the age of 115,” Gilbert wrote.

“When everything they say is designed to mislead, you're left to wonder why,” Wolfers wrote.READ MORE:Lawmaker vows 'strong resistance' if Musk agency recommends Social Security or Medicare cuts

---:{

---}:

mma

Myths and facts about birthright citizenship

Right-wing media are supporting Trump's move to end birthright citizenship by misleading viewers about what birthright citizenship actually means

Written by Torri Lonergan

Published 02/14/25

When President Donald Trump announced his intention to end birthright citizenship, right-wing media figures immediately began spreading misinformation to make the move appear more palatable. Right-wing media amplified Trump’s false claim that the U.S. is the only country with birthright citizenship, inaccurately suggested that birthright citizenship makes it easy for undocumented parents to become citizens, and obscured the fact that Trump’s executive order applies to the children of some who are in the country legally.

:{
  • Trump’s executive order is already facing at least five lawsuits from 22 states and has been temporarily blocked by multiple federal judges.}: U.S. District Judge John Coughenour called the order “blatantly unconstitutional” and issued a temporary restraining order to stop it from taking effect. U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman later issued a nationwide preliminary injunction against Trump's executive order, saying it “conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment." NPR, [1/21/25; AP News, 1/23/25; ABC News, 2/5/25]
:{
  • Having U.S. citizen children does not protect undocumented immigrants from deportation. }:According to the American Immigration Council, “From 2013 to 2018, ICE deported more than 231,000 people who reported having at least one U.S.-citizen child. In 2019, ICE deported 27,980 people with U.S.-born children.” This practice continues today, as Trump has explicitly stated that he intends to deport immigrants with U.S. citizen children as part of his mass deportation operation. American Immigration Council, [6/24/21; NBC News, 12/8/24; Department of Homeland Security, 10/4/21]

---

===

MMA

Fox joins the Trump administration’s war on the veteran-heavy federal workforce

Veterans make up nearly a third of civilian federal workers, the vast majority of whom are employed to assist veterans and the military

Written by Zachary Pleat

Published 02/14/25

Many Fox News personalities have celebrated the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on the federal workforce, which have ranged from offering questionable buyouts, purposefully demoralizing those who choose to remain in their jobs, and mass firings of recent hires.

But the federal workforce is the nation’s single largest employer of American military veterans, and the vast majority of civilian federal employees at Cabinet-level or otherwise major agencies work with veterans or the military.

The Trump administration has gone to war against the federal workforce

//

  1. ### After “disappointing” jobs report, Fox Business guest excitedly predicts future government job losses

02/07/25

  1. ### Fox host to federal workers: “Get a real job”

02/06/25 1:48 PM EST

  1. ### Fox News' Dana Perino calls public sector unions a “new nemesis”

02/11/25

mma

Trump is decimating the CFPB. Fox News isn't telling audiences what the agency does.

Written by Harrison Ray

Research contributions from Tyler Monroe & John Knefel

Published 02/14/25

Fox News mentioned key consumer protection measures from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau only once in its scant coverage of the bureau since Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025, took over as acting director on February 7 and began gutting agency functions.

Established in 2011 following the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB has worked to safeguard Americans from predatory financial practices by implementing consumer protection measures, such as limiting overdraft fees at banks, a practice that often disproportionately affects low-income consumers; limiting credit card late fees; and removing medical debt from credit reports, helping millions of Americans struggling with financial burdens.

The CFPB's work has also included securing over $21 billion in compensation or other relief for consumers harmed by unfair financial practices, combating discriminatory lending, investigating mortgage servicing junk fees, protecting service members from unfair lending practices, tackling peer-to-peer payment fraud, and reforming the student loan servicing market.

“Donald Trump did not go to the American people and says, ‘I want to raise your overdraft fees,’” answered Fowler.

Video

From the February 11, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five

Video

Citation

From the February 10, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

The horrific financial crisis proved that the financial services market needs a watchdog like the CFPB. Shutting the bureau down hurts the people the bureau protects from scams and predators, and it will hurt the companies that clearly need the agency’s fair rules, guidance, and law enforcement to deter potentially foolish behavior.

mma

Fox joins the Trump administration’s war on the veteran-heavy federal workforce

02/14/25 4:03 PM EST

  1. ### Trump is decimating the CFPB. Fox News isn't telling audiences what the agency does.

02/14/25 3:32 PM EST

  1. ### Fox News economist panel agrees Trump tariffs are bad for consumers

02/14/25

...1. ### Laura Ingraham sounded the alarm about the need for Congress to assert its authority against a “tyrant” “would-be dictator” in the White House — in 2014

02/14/25

  1. ### Jesse Watters calls on Attorney General Pam Bondi to “look into” Rep. Ocasio-Cortez

02/13/25 6:09 PM EST

  1. ### Greg Gutfeld: Tariffs create higher food prices that “disincentivizes” eating

02/13/25

===

mma

Fox News' Dana Perino calls public sector unions a “new nemesis”

02/11/25

Jesse Watters says Palestinians “demographically, they are a threat”

02/11/25

---

MMA

As the Trump administration effectively shuts down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Fox News is near silent

Written by Harrison Ray

Research contributions from John Knefel

Published 02/10/25

Last week, President Donald Trump appointed Russell Vought — a principal architect of Project 2025 who had been confirmed by the Senate to lead the Office of Management and Budget — as the acting director of the CFPB. Upon assuming his role, Vought ordered the CFPB's 1,700 employees to cease nearly all work and closed the agency's headquarters on February 10. He also halted approval processes for proposed rules, ongoing investigations, and public communications, effectively neutralizing the bureau's operations. Vought's actions so far at CFPB tracks the stated objectives for the bureau in Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint designed to hollow out federal agencies.

The CFPB, established in 2011 after the 2008 financial crisis in an effort to protect consumers from predatory financial practices, has long been a target for conservatives who view it as a site of government overreach. Dismantling the agency removes essential safeguards for Americans, like the Biden-era protections against surprise overdraft fees, reforms to the student loan servicing market, transformations in mortgage lending rules, and the enforcement of repayments to victims of fraud from banks and money transmitters.

Fox's coverage mostly centered around the announcement of Vought’s appointment, with little acknowledgement of the Project 2025 architect's imminent efforts to undermine the bureau.

We timed segments, which we defined as instances when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the stated topic of discussion, or when we find significant discussion of the bureau. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discuss the bureau with one another.

We also timed mentions, which we defined as instances when a speaker mentions the bureau without another speaker in the segment engaging with the comment, and teasers, which we defined as instances when the anchor or host promotes a segment about the bureau scheduled to air later in the broadcast.

We rounded all times to the nearest minute.

// MMA

Project 2025 architect begins dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau following years of right-wing media attacks

Right-wing media have targeted the CFPB even as it has saved working Americans tens of billions of dollars

Written by John Knefel

Research contributions from Isabella Corrao

Published 02/11/25 MMA

The new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a former top architect in the controversial transition plan known as Project 2025 — reportedly told its employees on February 10 to “not perform any work tasks this week,” at least temporarily shuttering an agency that has been the target of right-wing media attacks for years.

Russ Vought, who also serves as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote over the weekend that the CFPB “will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not 'reasonably necessary' to carry out its duties.”

The CFPB has saved working Americans tens of billions of dollars since it was founded in 2011, including more than $6 billion in annual overdraft fees alone from 2019-2023. Calling it “one of Wall Street’s most feared regulators,” The New York Times reported on February 9 that the bureau’s success has put it “squarely in the Trump administration’s cross hairs.”

It has clawed back $21 billion for consumers. It slashed overdraft fees, reformed the student loan servicing market, transformed mortgage lending rules and forced banks and money transmitters to compensate fraud victims.

It may no longer be able to carry out that work.

…

In less than 36 hours, Mr. Vought threw the agency into chaos. On Saturday, he ordered the bureau’s 1,700 employees to stop nearly all their work and announced plans to cut off the agency’s funding. Then on Sunday, he closed the bureau’s headquarters for the coming week. Workers who tried to retrieve their laptops from the office were turned away, employees said.

Now, Vought appears to be fulfilling a Project 2025 promise — and a longtime right-wing media goal — by taking an axe to the CFPB.

Vought and Project 2025 envision massive White House power grab

Prior to joining the Trump administration, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, one of more that 100 conservative organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025. He also wrote the chapter in Project 2025’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, on the Executive Office of the President of the United States, calling “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

Vought laid bare Project 2025’s broad ambitions in a secretly recorded video last year, saying that he and his collaborators had prepared “about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are — we’re planning for the next administration.”

The Trump administration has already begun following through on Project 2025’s goals, and dismantling the CFPB is no different. Mandate for Leadership refers to the bureau as a “highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency” that is “unconstitutional,” writing that the “next conservative President should order the immediate dissolution of the agency—pull down its prior rules, regulations and guidance, return its staff to their prior agencies and its building to the General Services Administration.”

In his dual role at the top of OMB and the CFPB, Vought is well-positioned to enact this sweeping agenda, and he is already taking steps that would amount to a massive power grab for Trump’s White House.

Vought and his colleagues at the Center for Renewing America are leading supporters of a radical theory that the executive branch can unilaterally refuse to spend money allocated by Congress. Toward that end, Vought issued an OMB memo that temporarily froze all federal funding. (The memo was later retracted after widespread backlash.)

Vought outlined his extreme vision for expansive control in a recent interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Video

Citation

From the November 18, 2024, edition of The Tucker Carlson Show on The Tucker Carlson Network

“There are no independent agencies,” Vought said, specifically mentioning the CFPB among others. “So there may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them, but as an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”

Right-wing media have long attacked the CFPB

Right-wing media figures have targeted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since its inception in the wake of the Great Recession.

In 2015, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board attacked the CFPB for its multiyear investigation into racially discriminatory car financing practices. The Journal’s board called the effort an “outrageous regulatory campaign” and called on Congress to implement additional hurdles to the CFPB’s enforcement capacity. The CFPB ultimately clawed back tens of millions of dollars for racial minorities who had been subject to higher-than-average loan rates across several lenders.

In November 2017, Fox News anchor Dana Perino invited a guest on to criticize the CFPB without disclosing that they represented clients opposed to the bureau’s regulations. Right-wing blog The Federalist published an article the same day with the headline: “This Is The Perfect Time To Destroy The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” A day later on Fox News, never-Trump conservative Jonah Goldberg referred to the CFPB as a “hate crime against the Constitution.”

More recently, right-wing media figures targeted a Biden-era initiative at the CFPB that went after predatory credit card gouging schemes and other junk fees that cost working people in the United States more than $10 billion every year.

The Trump administration has already begun following through on Project 2025’s goals, and dismantling the CFPB is no different

“This morning he's [President Biden] talking about late fees, and he's talking about corporate America, and it's companies' fault that people are facing inflation,” Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo said. The next day she again criticized Biden’s focus on “late fees,” directing her viewers’ anger toward undocumented immigrants instead of credit card companies.

On February 5, Fox published an opinion piece calling for Trump to “delete Elizabeth Warren’s failed experiment once and for all,” claiming that “CFPB is doing more harm than good, and its dissolution is not just a policy preference but an economic necessity.”

As news of Vought’s takeover broke, several conservative outlets cheered what they saw as the demise of the CFPB. The Daily Wire framed Vought’s actions in its headline as the “Latest Trump Admin Move To Cut Government Waste.” Conspiracy theory website The Gateway Pundit celebrated: “The corrupt agency which was the ‘brainchild’ of Senator Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren (D-MA) could be on its last legs.” The think tank Vought founded also weighed in, publishing a white paper titled: “The CFPB Should Be Shut Down.”

On Fox News, host Laura Ingraham defended the good name of several financial institutions against the intrusions of the CFPB.

“Now, to give you a sense of how partisan that place has become, in December its chief rushed to file several lawsuits against the payment platform Zelle, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, alleging this amorphous failure to protect consumers,” Ingraham said. “It's ridiculous. And it amounts to another shakedown of business by anti-capitalist crusaders. That’s all it is.”

Video

Citation

From the February 10, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

Ingraham was a lonely voice at Fox News celebrating the news, despite network figures campaigning against the CFPB for years. A Media Matters study found that between Vought’s appointment to head the agency on February 7 and 3 p.m ET on February 10, “network personalities mentioned the CFPB just 5 times for a total of about 40 seconds.”

---

MMA

Fox News' Brit Hume: “There is no doubt that tariffs in the short run, and perhaps very much so in the long as well, raise prices” 02/10/25

On Fox, Trump adviser Peter Navarro baselessly claims new tariffs “will bring the golden age for steel and aluminum back”

02/11/25

---

mma

2 25 watters politico pro BS

---

mma Fox News is mostly silent on Trump's ill-advised and dangerous release of water in California after weeks of attacking the state’s water policies

02/07/25

===

mma 2 25

In a new piece for MSNBC, I detail the ethical absurdity of Fox News hiring the sitting president's daughter-in-law:

Media observers have long recognized that Fox News effectively serves as an arm of President Donald Trump’s political apparatus. But with Wednesday’s announcement that the network has tapped his daughter-in-law, Lara, to host a weekly show, it’s clear Fox has abandoned any pretense that it functions as something other than a state TV channel.

...

Indeed, this deal is almost comically corrupt. No one should have any illusions that Fox has hired Lara Trump to produce anything other than crude propaganda for her father-in-law and his administration. And the arrangement for Fox to put money into the president’s family member’s bank account became public two days after Donald Trump met with network owner Rupert Murdoch in the Oval Office and publicly criticized his Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.

No credible news outlet would employ the president’s relative as a host. But Fox doesn’t function like a normal news outlet, and its executives apparently no longer care to pretend otherwise. Turning over airtime to Lara Trump is simply a natural progression for a network that merged with the White House during the president’s first term and is returning to that form for his second.

Read the whole thing here.

===}:

mma

Years of falsehoods from Fox News helped solidify offshore wind as a prime target for Trump

Against all evidence, right-wing media insist Trump is “saving the whales” and reducing energy costs through his nonsensical executive orders

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

Published 02/04/25

The order follows years of Fox News bashing offshore wind farms based largely on falsehoods repeated by the president and self-proclaimed conservationists with ties to fossil fuel interests. In addition to his so-called conservation efforts, Trump has promised to halve energy costs in his first year in office, and he immediately declared a “national energy emergency” with the intent of doing so. Economists and energy experts say he won’t succeed.

Offshore wind opponents, contradicting insights from marine mammal experts, maintain that the development of offshore wind farms along the East Coast is causing large whale die-offs. This poorly understood phenomenon has affected several whale species in the area since 2016. Trump and Fox News personalities, and other right-wing media figures, have characterized these projects as particularly destructive to wildlife, including birds.

Yet while they are feigning concern for whales, right-wing media are not mentioning offshore drilling for oil and gas — an activity that Trump has encouraged, and one that harms marine life. During these segments praising Trump's move to pause wind projects, they also haven’t focused on the jobs that would likely be eliminated if new offshore projects fail to materialize, while job loss has been a key focus of theirs in coverage of former President Joe Biden’s 2021 cancellation of an extension on the crude oil Keystone pipeline.

===

---

an 2 25

President Donald Trump has taken credit for distributing water to Southern California, but Fox News Chief National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin said otherwise. In fact, she said in a post on X on Monday, the water went to farmers whose dormant crops did not need it.

“President Trump again said he ‘turned the water on’ in California and that water could have been used to fight the wildfires,” Griffin wrote. “A few facts: The water released by the Army Corps of Engineers from 2 dams in Central California has no way to reach Southern California. The sudden rush alarmed local farmers whose land was nearly flooded.”

She added: “The water is usually kept in reserve to help farmers in Central California during summer drought months. There are no crops that need the water right now. They are dormant. The water was released by the Army Corps of Engineers from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success but has no way to connect to the aqueduct to deliver water to Southern California to be used for wildfires (most of which are now no longer burning).”

READ MORE: 'Exaggerated his own made-up claim': CNN rapid-fire fact-check busts Trump’s presser talking points

Griffin was responding to a post from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency: “Congratulations to the Administration and DOI’s [Department of Interior] Bureau of Reclamation for more than doubling the Federally pumped water flowing toward Southern California in < 72 hours. Was an honor for the DOGE team to work with you. Great job!”

Trump repeated the claim during a press conference Monday.

More water from Northern California would not have changed the outcome of the fires that destroyed parts of Los Angeles, a spokesperson for California Gov. Gavin Newsom told the Los Angeles Times.

“There is no shortage of water in Southern California,” Newsom’s spokesperson, Tara Gallegos, said. “Water operations to move water south through the Delta have nothing to do with the local fire response in Los Angeles. Trump is either unaware of how water is stored in California or is deliberately misleading the public.”

READ MORE: 'Steamrolling anything in his way': How Trump is 'bulldozing state and local power'

Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) also questioned the move. “Unscheduled water releases require close coordination with local officials and safety personnel, as well as downstream agricultural water users, in order to reduce flood risks to communities and farms,” he wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “Based on the urgent concerns I have heard from my constituents, as well as recent reporting, it appears that gravely insufficient notification was given, recklessly endangering residents downstream.”

“Today, 1.6 billion gallons and, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons. Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory!” Trump posted on X last week. “I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!

---

mma 1 25

January 31, 2025, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom

LYDIA HU (FOX BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT): Excluding oil and energy products from these 25% tariffs that are possibly starting tomorrow would be really significant. Even though the United States is a leading producer of oil for the world, we also consume a lot, too. We produce roughly 13 million barrels of oil a day, but we consume closer to 19 to 20 million barrels. So that means we have to import oil, and where are we getting a lot of that? We're getting it from Canada, we're bringing in roughly bringing in 6 1/2 million barrels of oil, roughly 3.9 million barrels come from Canada. So if those 25% tariffs apply to that Canadian crude oil, we're getting the warnings that the consumer could bear the burden. Analysts with TD economics say it could lead to an immediate jump in U.S. gas prices by as much as 30-70 cents per gallon.

...

These tariffs are really wide reaching, they could include lumber, they could include agriculture, they could also include steel and auto parts. And auto parts is also an interesting point because the auto parts are so integrated in trade, they trade across the border seven to eight times before they're actually installed in a car. And there are economists that warn these tariffs could also raise the price of a car by maybe $3,000. So that's something else we're keeping an eye on.

---

---

mma sorta random

  1. ### Charlie Kirk says that if Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) “wants to be a senator ever in his future, I certainly hope for his own sake he votes for Bobby Kennedy”

01/31/25 1:57 PM EST

  1. ### Ben Shapiro: “I support Bobby Kennedy for HHS”

01/31/25 1:49 PM EST

  1. ### Fox correspondent: Tariffs on Canadian crude oil “could lead to an immediate jump in U.S. gas prices by as much as 30-70 cents per gallon,” while tariffs on auto parts “could also raise the price of a car by maybe $3,000”

01/31/25 1:12 PM EST

  1. ### Fox News contributor: “I personally don't care” whether the migrants sent to Gitmo have criminal histories or not

01/31/25 12:04 PM EST

  1. ### Media Matters weekly newsletter, January 31

01/31/25 10:55 AM EST

  1. ### Fox host: Trump knows a lot about aviation because he buys planes and has pilots for friends

01/31/25 8:38 AM EST

  1. ### Sean Hannity links Washington, DC, plane crash to “insane DEI directives”

01/30/25 9:47 PM EST

  1. ### Jesse Watters says people should be “suspicious” that DEI plays a role in disasters

01/30/25 8:41 PM EST

  1. ### Laura Ingraham connects Washington, DC, plane crash to DEI

01/30/25 7:50 PM EST

  1. ### Jesse Watters: Air traffic control was “unable to meet their own DEI quotas, and that’s what is leading to staffing shortages”

01/30/25

===

MMA

Fox hosts have absolutely no idea how this Gitmo prison is going to work, but they love it

01/30/25

---

===

One Fox contributor called out RFK Jr.’s “lifetime spreading misinformation.” Fox's evening lineup then gushed over him.

Written by Isabella Corrao

Research contributions from John Whitehouse

Published 01/30/25 mma

On the first day of anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Senate confirmation hearings for secretary of Health and Human Services — where the nominee showed he doesn't understand how Medicaid works — most Fox News figures spent the evening fawning over Kennedy, despite his history of misinformation.

Meanwhile, other Rupert Murdoch-owned outlets are sounding the alarm about Kennedy's lack of qualifications, with one Wall Street Journal editorial board member appearing on Fox to emphasize that Kennedy “has spent a lifetime spreading misinformation.”

Fox News contributor Jason Riley: Kennedy “has spent a lifetime spreading misinformation"

On Special Report, Wall Street Journal columnist and Fox News contributor Jason Riley noted that Kennedy “has spent a lifetime spreading misinformation and enriching himself and trial lawyers by spreading this misinformation. I don’t think he’s the right person for the job.”

Video

From the January 29, 2025, edition of Fox News'Special Report with Bret Baier

The Wall Street Journal editorial page also called out Kennedy’s “clear conflict of interest” in making money on lawsuits against drug companies while head of HHS as flat-out “disqualifying”:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday to root out corruption between industry and government. Yet the man who wants to be the nation’s Secretary of Health and Human Services refused to rule out personally making money from lawsuits against drug makers. This ought to be disqualifying.

...

Mr. Kennedy’s disclosures show that he has received more than $2.5 million from law firms that have sued drug and vaccine makers. He also has a financial stake in a pending lawsuit against human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine maker Merck. Mr. Kennedy’s trial-lawyer ties and financial interests in litigation against drug makers pose a clear conflict of interest.

Indeed, Murdoch outlets like The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post have been some of the loudest critics of Kennedy's nomination, drawing criticism from the likes of Steve Bannon.

Nearly 100 million low-income Americans rely on Medicaid for their health care coverage, but it is one of many programs on the chopping block as Republicans prepare a massive bill aimed at cutting taxes for the rich. During his hearing, Kennedy showed ignorance of how Medicaid works. Perhaps the most devastating line of questioning came from a Republican senator:

> Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., repeatedly pressed Kennedy about proposed changes to the program and for his thoughts about Medicaid reform.

“Republicans, again, are looking at ways to potentially reform Medicaid to help pay for President Trump’s priorities,” Cassidy said. “What thoughts do you have regarding Medicaid reform?”

“Most people who are on Medicaid are not happy,” Kennedy responded. “The premiums are too high, the deductibles are too high, the networks are narrow.”

A 2023 poll from KFF, a nonprofit group that researches health policy issues, found that a majority of Americans have “very favorable” or “somewhat favorable” views of the program. He made similar comments about the Affordable Care Act.

People on Medicaid generally aren’t charged premiums or deductibles at all.

Kennedy also reportedly made false or misleading claims about vaccines, chronic disease in children, and even his own previous remarks — such as when he was caught on video in 2023 pushing the deranged conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was “targeted” to “attack Caucasians and Black people” and exclude Jewish and Chinese people.

Kennedy has a troubling history of pushing false claims about public health and safety. He long has argued that “autism comes from vaccines,” despite many peer-reviewed studies concluding there is no link.

In 2019, then the chairman of the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children Health’s Defense, Kennedy traveled to the country Samoa and seemingly took advantage of two babies’ deaths resulting from improperly administered measles vaccines to emphasize the supposed dangers of vaccines and discourage vaccination efforts. Eighty-three people died from measles and thousands were sickened in the outbreak that subsequently swept Samoa.

Despite Kennedy's record of pushing misinformation and his questionable performance in the hearing — and despite the record of criticism of Kennedy from Murdoch outlets — Fox News’ biggest hosts unabashedly celebrated his nomination after the first hearing:

---

1 25

Fox touted the impoundment memo from Trump's OMB. The memo was just rescinded after widespread pushback.

mma

fox touted the impoundment memo from Trump's OMB. The memo was just rescinded after widespread pushback.

Written by Zachary Pleat

Published 01/29/25

Barely two days after the Trump administration issued a memo ordering a freeze on federal grants and loans — which was temporarily put on hold by a federal judge before it officially went into effect — the administration issued another memo today seemingly rescinding the funding freeze.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt further confused the issue hours later, stating, “This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo.” Leavitt’s comments reportedly caused a different federal judge to issue a restraining order against this funding freeze in a lawsuit brought by over 20 state attorneys general.

Experts argued that the funding freeze, which caused chaos and risked damage to innumerable critical programs across the country, amounted to an unconstitutional impoundment of congressionally authorized spending, and it had fingerprints from Project 2025 all over it. That didn’t stop Fox News and Fox Business personalities from vociferously defending the likely illegal power grab throughout Tuesday and into Wednesday.

Trump’s attempt to freeze federal spending was likely an unconstitutional power grab

//

  1. ### Russ Vought’s fingerprints are all over Trump’s new federal funding freeze

01/28/25 1:33 PM EST

  1. ### Project 2025 partner lays foundation for Trump to ignore congressional spending in major power grab

07/08/24 9:57 AM EDT

  1. ### Fox News rushes to downplay GAO report that found Trump broke the law by withholding aid from Ukraine

01/17/2x

===

===

mma

Fox follows Jamie Dimon in endorsing higher inflation from Trump’s planned tariffs: “So be it”

01/24/25

===

mma

After Trump sets January 6 rioters free, Fox News changes its tune on pardons for violent offenders

During a stretch of Fox programming full of backtracking and excuses for Trump’s pardons, Laura Ingraham hosted two pardoned rioters to rewrite their stories

Written by Alicia Sadowski, Jane Lee, Isabella Corrao & Helena Hind

Published 01/22/25

President Donald Trump has issued pardons or commuted the sentences of all January 6 offenders, violent and nonviolent, flouting the advice of Fox hosts who previously urged him to grant a narrower pardon. With this day one action, Trump has freed over 1,500 offenders, including “violent offenders who went after the police” and “some of the most notorious participants in the attack,” individuals convicted of conspiracy, a rioter who carried a firearm, and a rioter who faced a long list of assault charges.

Fox News hosts maintained for years that violent offenders should not be pardoned

In the immediate aftermath of January 6, Fox News personalities spoke out against the insurrection, with some privately begging the administration to stop the Capitol attack. Even after Trump changed his tune on January 6 offenders and began suggesting pardons for them, Fox News maintained that those who had physically attacked law enforcement should not be among the pardoned.

Even though these Fox hosts argued against pardoning violent offenders from January 6 as recently as December, since Monday, Fox hosts have clearly and at times explicitly supported Trump’s decision to pardon all offenders.

On her Fox News show, Ingraham hosted two people who were issued pardons by Trump and allowed them to rewrite their offenses. During the attack on January 6, Ingraham texted then-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, imploring him to get Trump to take action, writing: “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.” Four years later, she’s hosting participants and defending Trump’s blanket pardons.

Video

From the January 21, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

LARGE STEEL SCREW

---

mma

January 9, 2025, edition of Fox Business' Mornings with Maria

MARIA BARTIROMO (ANCHOR): Have we ruled out all outside agitators?

MARK TEPPER (GUEST): No. In fact, I think there were videos of some arsonists creating new fires. So no, I don't think that's been ruled out at all and given the terror attacks that we saw on January 1, I mean, it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility that that's happening. But you know, what's happening right now — at least for me — a lack of mitigation standpoint prior to this has to do with the fact that California is effectively a one-party system. And when you're operating under a one-party system, there's no accountability from the other party to help you make sure that you're doing what you should be doing.

BARTIROMO: That's a great point.

TEPPER: Gross incompetence. Having priorities backwards. All that stuff contributed to what's happening, not saying it caused it, but it certainly contributed.

BARTIROMO: But I'd like to know what kind of investigation is underway in terms of outside agitators. I mean, all of these people who have come into America and wanting to disrupt our lives. I would like to see an investigation to ensure that we know that there were no outside agitators starting these fires.

---

mma 1 25

  1. ### Trump reportedly pushed for Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo to be his running mate

01/08/25 12:19 PM EST

  1. ### Trump reportedly got advance town hall questions from a Fox insider

01/08/25

===

MMA

On January 6, 2021, as a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and halted Congress’ counting of electoral votes, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade dashed off a desperate text to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

“Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished,” he wrote of Trump, who had summoned the enraged crowd to Washington, D.C., and incited it with lies that the 2020 election had been stolen as part of a plot to subvert that election.

Kilmeade expressed a drastically different view on Monday, as a new Congress prepared to count the electoral votes that would return Trump to the Oval Office.

In one of Fox & Friends’ few references to the January 6 insurrection that morning, he mocked Democrats who “want to point out how different” today’s events will be “from four years ago” when “democracy was in danger.”

Kilmeade added that the American people think that January 6, “as bad as that day was, it’s a small part of the Donald Trump story” and that it would be “put to bed even further after today happens.”

The Fox & Friends host is one of an array of right-wing media figures who said at the time that the January 6 insurrection was a calamity, that the rioters were criminals, and that Trump himself bore responsibility for their actions. But over the past four years, they have participated in the right’s Great Forgetting, making their peace with Trump’s attempted coup and supporting his return to the presidency.

“Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was like. Very soon, someone might try to convince you that it was different,” The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote the next day. “The health of the republic depends both on what swift consequences come—for Trump and for others—and also on how people remember the participants’ actions later on.”

Graham’s warning proved prescient. As the attack unfolded and in its immediate aftermath, many media figures on the right joined those on center and left in condemning the attack — and Trump’s work to incite it — in the strongest possible terms. But they did not sustain their initial response.

“Shoot the protestors,” influential commentator Erick Erickson wrote that afternoon. He added that Trump should receive immediate consequences that would end his political career: “Waive the rules, impeach. Waive the rules, convict. Waive the rules, deny the ability to run for election again.”

Four years later, Erickson offered this take: “First, Happy January 6th to all who celebrate. Note to the media: The exit polling in November showed that most voters do not care. That you will try to make them care today is another reason trust in the media is beneath that of Congress itself.”

Fox chief political analyst Brit Hume likewise denounced Trump at the time for having “fueled the worst suspicions of his supporters with wild claims that the election was stolen. And now we see the result.” But on Election Day 2024, he declared this “a BS issue” because “the thing was over in a matter of hours.”

Erickson and Hume are among a long list of right-wing media notables who condemned January 6 — and even Trump for bringing it about — but came around to implicitly or explicitly support his return to the presidency, even as he showed no remorse for his own actions and valorized the rioters.

Rupert Murdoch, whose right-wing media empire is one of the most potent forces in Republican politics, wrote in an email to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott on Inauguration Day 2021 that Trump’s election lies had been “pretty much a crime” that made January 6 “inevitable.” He added: “Best we don't mention his name unless essential and certainly don't support him."

On Fox, numerous hosts condemned the criminal acts of the mob and said its members deserved punishment, with some even describing such denunciations as morally necessary.

“Those who truly support President Trump, those that believe they are part of the conservative movement in this country, you do not — we do not support those that commit acts of violence,” offered Fox host and Trump adviser Sean Hannity. “Every good and decent American, we know, will and must condemn what happened at the Capitol.”

“The actions at the United States Capitol three days ago were deplorable, reprehensible, outright criminal,” Jeanine Pirro likewise declared. “Anyone watching this must condemn it.”

Fox contributor Mark Thiessen was among the few to single out Trump on the network’s airwaves, saying the then-president had been “responsible for what happened,” and he went much further in a Washington Post column.

“It was one of the darkest moments in the history of our democracy. And Trump is responsible for it,” he wrote. “Trump formed and incited the mob. He stoked their anger with self-serving lies. He betrayed his followers. He betrayed his office. And now he has blood on his hands.”

The organs of the upper-crust right were united in blaming Trump for the attack.

Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal wrote in a January 7, 2021, editorial that Trump should resign the presidency after committing “an assault on the constitutional process of transferring power after an election.” The New York Post editorial board wrote that “while the roots of this madness were many, with some blame across the spectrum, it’s fundamentally on President Trump.” And the editors of National Review said Trump “found a new low” by having “whipped up and urged on a mob toward the U.S. Capitol, where it breached the building and forced his vice president and lawmakers to flee.”

The hosts of the All-In podcast, which became a key venue of the MAGA tech right, were even more scathing at the time, describing Trump as “a complete piece-of-shit fucking scumbag” who had engaged in “insane, deranged, criminal, lunatic behavior” and had “disqualified himself from being a candidate at a national level.”

These comments reflected the widespread initial consensus that January 6 had been horrific — and that Trump had been responsible for it. In the first days following the attack, politicians of both parties, corporate leaders, and the public at large responded with revulsion and demands for consequences.

But that unity ultimately proved fragile. A coterie of Trumpists, led by former Fox host Tucker Carlson, worked diligently to unwind it, reframing the sacking of the U.S. Capitol as either unimportant — or a conspiracy driven by Democrats and the media in which the assailants were the real victims of a crackdown on “political dissidents,” as Fox’s Rachel Campos-Duffy put it last week.

As this fraudulent counternarrative became increasingly widespread, most other conservative media figures eventually chose to join the right’s Great Forgetting. They pretended that a president who they knew had tried to overturn the republic was fit to return to that office. And in so doing, they helped power Trump from his post-January 6 position of disgrace back to the GOP nomination and the presidency.

Trump’s return to office sets the stage for more authoritarian acts. He never repudiated his election lies or the attack they incited, instead valorizing the January 6 “hostages” and promising they will receive pardons as one of his first acts in office. And he is assembling a team to carry out the “retribution” he has promised to inflict on his political foes, including an FBI director who proposed legal action against the conspirators, “not just in government but in the media,” who he claimed “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

Trump’s authoritarian impulses may ultimately come to nothing. But with their actions after January 6, the leading lights of the right have already signaled their willingness to accept whatever he does.

//

The Fox News coup

01/06/21

They did it and will do it again – if no one stops them

07/22/22

  1. ### Fox personalities now claim that January 6 prosecutions are political. At the time, many condemned the attack: “Deplorable, reprehensible, outright criminal”

05/21/24 MMA

===

Steve Bannon threatens DOJ officials: “We are going to torment you and destroy your lives”

01/06/25 mma

January 6, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Matthew Graves. These people are relentless. They are unchained, and Matthew Graves has to understand something. Matthew Graves, write this down. Or if Matthew Graves' family or anybody that knows Matthew Graves, make sure his family knows this.

You're going to prison for a very long time. You're a totally evil person that has broken the law and destroyed lives, and the people whose lives you destroyed may not have the power to do anything about it, but we certainly do, and we are. You are a truly evil individual and you're deranged.

Lisa Monaco, Merrick Garland, the guy Bratt, Matthew Graves, all of you, we are going to torment you and destroy your lives because you deserve to have your lives destroyed like you've destroyed patriots from January 6th. Yes, patriots.

…

Matthew Graves, you think this is funny? You think we take this as funny? We don't take it as funny, brother.

And when you're serving in your 10th year of your 20 year sentence in that - in the cell, in a cell block right at some low security, because you're not going to go to a camp, to a low security prison, I want you to remember this day when we actually committed ourselves body and soul to make sure that you people are hunted down and brought to justice.

//

Steve Bannon says Mike Johnson should not be speaker: “We don't need partisanship now. We need hyper-partisanship now.”

12/20/24 1:53 PM EST

  1. ### Media Matters weekly newsletter, December 20

12/20/24 10:48 AM EST

  1. ### Steve Bannon on a government shutdown: “I'd like just to shut it down. Go home.”

12/19/24

---

porn star case sentencing

Fox News legal analyst calls for investigation into Jack Smith and his staff

01/03/25

January 3, 2025, edition of Fox News' Hannity

JASON CHAFFETZ (HOST): Gregg, what's the incoming administration -- what can they do to push back not just in this case, but across the country, the lawfare that's been used against the Trump family, quite frankly, and against conservatives and Republicans broadly? What can this administration do to just put justice back where it's supposed to be, with a blindfold and equal to everybody?

GREGG JARRETT (GUEST): Well, Trump already won the lawfare battle. He is essentially prevailed. This is sort of the last case -- and the professor and I agree, it's guaranteed to get reversed because it was such an abomination.

But I do think, to answer your question, that the incoming Department of Justice needs to take a very close look at the conduct of Jack Smith, his entire staff, bringing specious cases in Washington and Florida. And if laws were broken by prosecutors, those prosecutors should be prosecuted. If they didn't break laws, nevertheless, their unscrupulous, unprincipled behavior needs to be exposed, and that's the job for Pam Bondi, assuming she is approved as the next attorney general in charge of the Department of Justice.

Same thing goes for the FBI. I mean, it has -- sad to say, this is not a reflection on the hardworking agents out in the field, but, you know, it is the headquarters that has corrupted itself with an abuse of the law and that needs to be fixed as well.

===

pirro DEI BS //

mma 1 25

New Orleans truck attack restarts the Fox-Trump feedback loop

Minutes after Fox falsely reported the suspect had just crossed the border, Trump claimed he was an immigrant

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 01/02/25 1:08 PM ESTmma

President-elect Donald Trump keeps falsely suggesting that the native-born U.S. Army veteran who rammed a pickup truck into a crowd in New Orleans on New Year’s Day was an immigrant. He appears to have been misled by a Fox News report — subsequently retracted — alleging that the assailant crossed the border from Mexico two days before the attack.

The falsehoods mark a resumption of the Trump-Fox feedback loop that powered his communications during his first term in the White House. The then-president, an obsessive consumer of Fox programming, sent nearly 1,300 tweets in response to coverage he saw on Fox News and Fox Business over the last 29 months of his tenure.

At around 3:15 a.m., the driver of a pickup truck sped through a crowd of revelers on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, killing at least 15 people and injuring dozens more before being killed in a shoot-out with police. The driver was later identified as Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, a U.S. citizen and Army veteran born and raised in Texas who claimed to have joined ISIS.

But at 10:40 a.m. ET on Wednesday — before authorities had confirmed the suspect’s name — Fox aired an anonymously-sourced bombshell report claiming that he had crossed the border from Mexico earlier that week.

“According to federal sources, the suspect drove a truck with that Texas license plate, OK — so this is just coming into our newsroom now. This is from Griff Jenkins and David Spunt working their federal sources on this,” anchor Molly Line said. “According to their sources, this person came through Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago.”

Video

From the 10 a.m. ET hour of Fox News' live coverage on January 1, 2025

Within minutes, Trump amplified Fox’s incendiary claim, arguing that the New Orleans attack showed he had been correct about “criminals coming in” to the U.S.

“When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” he posted to his Truth Social platform at 10:48 a.m. “The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department.”

But as Trump parroted Fox’s reporting, the network’s reporters were walking it back, saying that the sources only confirmed that the truck, and not the suspect, had crossed the border earlier in the week.

“We’re hearing that the vehicle was traced to coming across from Mexico into the United States at Eagle Pass, Texas, two days ago,” Spunt told Fox’s audience at around the same time Trump posted.

“To be clear, we don’t 100% know that this man — and we do know the suspect is a man — was the person driving that crossed the border,” he continued. “That is unclear at this point. We just know that the actual license plate was picked up by a reader at a border crossing. This is per two federal law enforcement sources to Fox News."

“I know that raises more questions than answers, but we are providing information to our viewers as we get it, the most accurate information,” Spunt added.

Video

From the 10 a.m. ET hour of Fox News' January 1, 2025, live coverage.

But Fox had not carefully provided its viewers — including the former president — with “the most accurate information."

Roughly an hour later, a Fox anchor reported that the network’s sources had confirmed that the pickup truck actually crossed the border at Eagle Pass on November 16 — nearly two months ago, not two days — and that the driver at the time had not been the suspect. The car-sharing company Turo later confirmed that the suspect had rented the truck used in the attack.

A few hours after that, as more information about the suspect came out, Spunt ended up in the curious position of correcting the false Trump claim that his own reporting had seemingly spurred. Spunt read the Truth Social statement during the 4 p.m. ET hour and commented, “Now, the former president said ‘criminals coming in’ in his statement, meaning into our country, but to be clear, Molly and Brian, the suspect was born in the United States.”

The correction did nothing to deter Trump, who posted overnight that “this is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS” and blamed Democrats “for allowing this to happen to our Country.”

By the following morning, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Waltz, was on Fox & Friends explaining that the attack demonstrated the need to “close the border, secure our sovereignty.”

Minutes after that, Trump posted that the attack by a native-born citizen had proven him correct about the border. “With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined,” he wrote.

Trump appears to be starting his second term the same way he spent his first one — by riffing on what he sees on his television.

Fox News keeps linking the New Orleans truck attack to border security despite no apparent link

The network featured future Trump officials who emphasized border security, even when they noted the suspect was American

Written by Gideon Taaffe, Jack Winstanley, Jane Lee & Helena Hind

Published 01/02/25 mma

Updated 01/03/25 10:15 AM EST

After a truck-ramming attack killed at least 14 people at a New Year's celebration in New Orleans, Fox News misreported that the vehicle used came across the southern border two days earlier, implying that the suspected perpetrator — later identified as an Army veteran born in the U.S. — had also crossed the border.

Although the network has seemingly attempted to quietly walk back the false information, Fox personalities and guests — including some former and incoming Trump administration picks — have continued to baselessly connect an act of terror reportedly committed by a U.S. citizen to the southern border in order to fearmonger about terrorists entering the country.

After a deadly truck attack in New Orleans, Fox News quickly sought to tie the attack to the southern border

{ After reporting that the suspect was a U.S. citizen who drove from Texas, Fox’s Todd Piro asked his guest, “Would you say we are at pre-9/11 threat level specifically because of Joe Biden's border policies — in other words, is there an extensive ISIS threat in our homeland?” His guest, former Trump Homeland Security Deputy Assistant Secretary Jonathan Fahey, responded: “We don't really know what that threat is but I do think Biden's border policies — whether or not it had anything to do with this, where it doesn't seem like it did — but it does create the perception we do not have a secure border and a secure country,}: and that this administration is more concerned about advancing their political agenda than they are about protecting public safety and national security.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends First*, [1/2/25]

* During a segment discussing the attack,The Fiveco-host Lisa Kennedy Montgomery mentioned “hundreds, maybe thousands of people associated with, you know, groups from ISIS-K to Al-Shabaab in this country illegally, potentially gotaways we don't even know about.” Co-host Jessica Tarlov noted that “there are two stories being told about this perpetrator, one that ... this was a home-grown American terrorist" and “then there is another narrative that is being boosted by people who want to make a case about open borders, that this is someone who, you know, flew through Eagle Pass, drove to New Orleans and tried to kill a bunch of people. That's obviously not what happened here.” Fox News, *The Five*, [1/2/25]

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed the New Orleans attack on soft-on-crime and open border policies.Pompeo claimed, “When America fails to lead, when you don't engage in solid law enforcement and enforcing criminal laws, when you can't secure your borders, when you refuse to call out radical Islamic terrorism and punish it, you get the events of October 7, you get the events of just this past week in New Orleans.” Pompeo later fearmongered about migrants crossing the southern border, saying, “We’ve also seen a couple of hundred folks that are on the terror watch list come across our southern border. We don't have any earthly idea where many of these folks are.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [1/2/25]

New Orleans truck attack restarts the Fox-Trump feedback loop

01/02/25 1:08 PM EST

  1. ### CNN's Jim Acosta calls out Republican strategist for defending Trump falsely blaming immigration for New Orleans terror attack

01/02/25 1:29 PM EST

Newsmax guest calls on Trump to deport imams and shut down mosques

01/02/25

//

mma

[## Benny Johnson on the New Orleans attack: “Was this an inside job?”

01/02/25 9:30 AM EST](https://www.mediamatters.org/benny-johnson/benny-johnson-new-orleans-attack-was-inside-job)

mma

December 20, 2024, edition of Fox News' The Five

CHARLIE HURT (CO-HOST): First of all, I'm always in the pro-government shutdown caucus. I'm fully in favor of government shutdowns, I think they're fantastic. I think it's a great first step, quite frankly. If Republicans think that they're going to get done what they need to get done without some really ugly stuff happening, it's -- they're sorely mistaken. They're -- you're going to have this either now or at some point in this fight to get done what they need to get done and what voters have asked Donald Trump to get done.

I think it's really funny watching all of this for the Democrats. Democrats are great at playing mental games. That's, like, all they do is play mental games. But the big difference I think now is, I think that -- I don't -- and the media always blames Republicans, every single time, Republicans never pay a price in an election. I think if they actually get something done as a result of this, then not only will they not pay a bad price, they might be rewarded tremendously by voters.

===

mma

Right-wing media resume misleading attacks on hurricane recovery efforts after Biden announces humanitarian assistance for Africa

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

Published 12/13/24 9

Right-wing media ramped up attacks on the Biden administration’s hurricane recovery efforts in southern Appalachia after President Joe Biden announced $1 billion in humanitarian aid for Africa.

On December 3, Biden became the first president to visit the African country of Angola, where he announced new aid “to address food insecurity and other urgent needs of refugees, internally displaced persons, and affected communities in 31 African countries,” according to the United States Agency of International Development.

According to Oxfam, a federation of international nongovernmental organizations addressing global poverty, “more than 24 million people in southern Africa face hunger, malnutrition and water scarcity due to drought and floods.” Oxfam also described southern Africa as a “climate disaster hotspot.”

Earlier this year, FEMA was the subject of right-wing attacks falsely accusing the agency of squandering disaster relief money on immigrants, preventingvictims of Hurricane Helene from accessing aid, and even seizing the land of people whose homes had been destroyed. Conspiracy theories about government weather manipulation also circulated online.

Right-wing media falsely accused the Biden administration of favoring Africa over hurricane-stricken communities in the U.S., reviving harmful FEMA misinformation

Fox News, *Fox & Friends First*, [12/4/24]

related

  1. ### Right-wing media lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene

:{10/04/24

  1. ### How a lie about immigrants and FEMA disaster aid spread across Fox News

:{10/11/24

  1. ### As social media posts calling for violence against FEMA gained traction, fear about armed groups forced the agency to proceed with caution

10/18/24

---

---

December 12, 2024, edition of Fox News' Hannity

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Checking in with Tim and Gwen Walz, they released this incredibly, kind of cringeworthy video while decorating their Christmas tree. Take a look.

...

My only question is, Rachel, I wonder if they put any feminine hygiene products on the tree, number one. Number two, I wonder if they're burning tires outside their homes so they can get that smell of freedom back that they love so much.

RACHEL CAMPOS-DUFFY (GUEST): Yeah, this was so cringe, it almost felt like SNL. By the way, notice how they don't call their tree a Christmas tree, it's a "family tree." These guys were such communists. I have to tell you, we really dodged a bullet not just with Kamala but also imagine if this was the vice president and his second lady. I mean, these people are very strange. And it's weird, remember they went around saying JD Vance was weird. This is weird.

HANNITY: Yeah, you probably can't see this, Jason, but he walks on — up in the air, kicking his feet in the air — bowing. I mean, the weirdest guy I've ever seen in my life. But I do wonder, I mean, what did they decorate the tree with? I mean, if they believe so much in feminine hygiene products in boys bathrooms in school, why wouldn't they put it on their Christmas tree?

JASON CHAFFETZ (GUEST): Well, they put a toilet paper roll on top. I mean, they're just -- there are just some things that you're not supposed to share with the whole rest of the world. I mean, this is so embarrassing. The contrast couldn't be bigger. You've got freedom ringing out, you've got people chanting "USA," they're feeling, you know — they're talking about patriotism with Donald Trump. Meanwhile, we go to the Walz basement or wherever they're at, I mean, it's like taking the green casserole from Thanksgiving. You got to take it out of the fridge and at some point you just have to throw it away. And that's what we need to do here.

---

mma

Fox host responds to Justin Trudeau's defense of women's rights: “Wow, Justine Trudeau, ... what brand of tampons do you use?”

12/12/24

December 12, 2024, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered

KAYLEIGH MCENANY (CO-HOST): Well, he seems very proud of himself right there. I mean, Kennedy, could a counterpunch get any lamer?

LISA KENNEDY MONTGOMERY (FOX HOST): No. I watched that and I went, wow, Justine Trudeau, what --

LAUREN SIMONETTI (FOX REPORTER): Governor of the year.

KENNEDY MONTGOMERY: -- what brand of tampons do you use?

MCENANY: Oh my goodness.

KENNEDY MONTGOMERY: I'm such a proud feminist.

DAVID WEBB (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Ask Tim Walz.

KENNEDY MONTGOMERY: My goodness. Ooh I'm -- I'm trembling with fear. Please don't invade us with your soy boy-ness.

===

an 12 24

no lnx

alternet-

Republicans spill the beans: Fox News has a launched lobbying blitz for key Trump nominee

Alexandria Jacobson,Matt Lasloand Raw Story December 12, 2024

As Vice President-elect Sen. J.D. Vance walked the marble halls of the Capitol this week and attended Wednesday's Republican Conference lunch to advocate for Donald Trump's defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, the host's colleagues back at Fox News were also working the phones.

At least two senators have been contacted by people who work with the Fox and Friends Weekend co-host.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Raw Story that Hegseth's Fox colleagues got in touch with him and he considers them "pretty solid references," given that they work with him daily.

"I think most of us have a bias toward supporting the president’s nominees. I think there’s no doubt that Pete's doing a good job meeting people, and I would say also his colleagues at Fox who reached out — they reached out to me — and really giving him just stellar recommendations."

While Johnson said speaking with former colleagues as references is "what you do with any job interview," the secretary of defense is second only to the president as commander-in-chief in charge of the military.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told Raw story one Fox colleague had reached out to him directly, and the senator had called three more.

"They love him," he said. "It's very reassuring."

Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) told Raw Story "of course" the current relationship between Fox News and the Republican Party is worrisome.

"It's ridiculous," he said.

Tester wasn't aware that Hegseth's colleagues were reaching out to senators.

ALSO READ: Agenda 47: Alarm sounded about Trump’s dystopian plans for his second term

"They’re gonna do what they wanna do. I just hope that the person who gets in that position, they’re up for the task and the job, Tester said. "It’s a really important damn job, and that’s the point. It isn’t good guy, bad guy. Doesn’t matter. You gotta be up for the job."

Since Trump nominated Hegseth on Nov. 12, his fitness for the position has been scrutinized. NBC reported that 10 of Hegseth's colleagues at Fox had concerns about his drinking, some allegedly smelling alcohol on him before going on the air. The New Yorker reported that Hegseth was forced out of other previous leadership positions for intoxication on the job, sexist comments and financial mismanagement.

As part of a nondisclosure agreement, Hegseth paid a settlement to a woman who accused him of raping her after drinking at a hotel bar. The Washington Post reported that he claimed the payment was made out of fear of "immediate termination from Fox."

“President Trump is nominating high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his Administration. Mr. Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again," Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, told the Washington Post.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) told Raw Story he had "not yet" been contacted by Hegseth's Fox News peers but agreed there'd been a change in the mood from Republicans this week towards supporting Hegseth.

"I think you'd expect that. Several senators had talked to him, and they were somewhat satisfied," Grassley said.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said he hadn't been contacted by people at Fox News. Both he and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) laughed when Raw Story asked if they were disappointed that Hegseth's colleagues hadn't called.

Hawley said he'd "be happy to talk" with Hegseth's colleagues and found co-hosts vouching for him, particularly regarding concerns about drinking, to be "reasonable and "not unusual."

Trump's decision to nominate cabinet members with strong connections to Fox News appears to be a strategic choice, Hawley said.

"I defer to the president's thinking on this. It seems like to me that he clearly wants people who can defend his policies on TV, in front of the media, so I think clearly he's thinking about if people can talk to reporters," Hawley told Raw Story.

A spokesperson for Fox did not immediately respond to Raw Story's request for comment, nor did a spokesperson for Trump's campaign.

===

mma 12 24

Fox News is downplaying Donald Trump’s extreme agenda as moderate

Written by Gideon Taaffe

Published 12/11/24 mma

As Donald Trump prepares to begin his second term in office, Fox News is downplaying his agenda that threatens to deport millions of people, implement destructive economic policy, roll back reproductive rights, enact “retribution” against his rivals, promote anti-vaccine figures to be in charge of public health, and radically gut federal entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Trump campaigned on extreme policies endorsed by the far-right Project 2025, with many of the platform’s architects now joining his administration, and Fox News has been working since the election to make his agenda appear more moderate.

Fox News downplays Trump’s plan for mass deportations and emphasizes a supposed focus on criminals

---

mma Fox News guest preemptively absolves Trump from inflation during his term

Mark Tepper: “I'm more concerned about a year from today, and it would have nothing to do with President Trump's policies, but rather the second wave of President Biden's policies that could potentially hurt us even more”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 12/11/24

Video

From the December 11, 2024, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom

MARK TEPPER (STRATEGIC WEALTH PARTNERS CEO): We made a heck of a lot of progress, obviously inflation has come down, but it's stubbornly now high. It's not getting any lower. For four straight months we've seen, from a month-over-month standpoint, core CPI come in at 0.3% which is basically twice the Fed's mandate of 2% annually. ... Some of the stickier issues, it gives me concern that we're going to be stuck in this situation for a little longer than we'd like, and according to Strategic's research, whenever inflation exceeds 6%, which we were up to 9.1%, there's an 85% chance of a second wave of inflation. So I'm more concerned about a year from today. And it would have nothing to do with President Trump's policies, but rather the second wave of President Biden's policies that could potentially hurt us even more.

mma

Conservative pundits criticize planned Federal Reserve interest rate cuts after slight inflation increase

Right-wing media previously tried to discourage rate cuts, then accused the Fed of political interference

Written by Zachary Pleat

Published 12/11/24 mma

Conservative economic commentators are criticizing the Federal Reserve ahead of expected interest rate cuts later this month, using a slight uptick in one inflation measurement to renew their campaign to bully Fed policy makers.

On December 11, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly update of the consumer price index, which showed a slight uptick of 0.3% in November and a 2.7% rate of inflation over the past 12 months. The CPI measurement was in line with economists’ expectations and is yet more evidence that inflation has stabilized far below its previous peak of around 9% in mid-2022.

The stable inflation picture is likely to result in another Federal Reserve interest rate cut when monetary policymakers meet next week, but conservative economic commentators are using the marginal inflation uptick to renew their criticism of the Fed for its previous decision to begin reducing interest rates.

Meanwhile, prominent economists have explained that the Fed should have been cutting rates much earlier than it did.

Conservative economic commentators warn against future rate cuts

Right-wing media previously tried to bully the Fed away from cutting rates

//

  1. ### Fox News guest preemptively absolves Trump from inflation during his term

12/11/24 11:26 AM EST

  1. ### Trump sycophants are trying to bully the Federal Reserve away from expected interest rate cuts

08/28/24 1:20 PM EDT

  1. ### The Federal Reserve cut interest rates because inflation is now under control – but Fox smells a conspiracy

09/19/24

---

AN 12 24

Fox News hosts Sandra Smith and Jeanine Pirro criticized Republican state Delegate Nino Mangione of Maryland after his cousin, Luigi Mangione, was arrested for the murder of CEO executive Brian Thompson.

"Another twist in this story, this just into our newsroom, the suspect's cousin is a Maryland State Delegate," Smith reported Monday. "So this is now being confirmed, the suspect's cousin is a Maryland State Delegate, Antonio D. Mangione, goes by Nino."

"How was it possible there wasn't anyone, anywhere in the country who was saying, that person's in my family, I know that guy?" she said.

Former FBI investigator Bill Daly said it was "quite surprising that it took a McDonald's employee in Pennsylvania to identify this person."

"How does anybody who is related to this person not say, I know that guy, and call the police?" Smith asked Pirro.

"Well, that is certainly a very relevant question," Pirro agreed. "Once a guy at McDonald's can pick up the phone and a relative and someone who is in a particular job where he's working for the government, essentially, and for the people, can't, you know you've got a problem."

Watch the video below from Fox News.

//

man being held in connection to the Manhattan shooting of a health insurance executive reportedly had a manifesto claiming violence was the answer to problems with the health care industry.

The New York Times reported Monday that Luigi Mangione, 26, was being held in Pennsylvania in connection to the shooting of Brian Thompson.

Mangione was said to have a handwritten manifesto railing against the insurance industry for putting profits above health care.

According to CNN, the document suggested that violence was the answer to health care insurance problems.

A "ghost gun" and a suppressor were also reportedly found in the man's possession.

===

NO LNX

alternet

Inside Fox News' media malfeasance

Fox News removes 'unethical' digitally altered images of police brutality protests in Seattle

Sabrina Haake, Raw Story December 09, 2024

Mainstream media spent last week in a self-righteous frenzy over Joe Biden’s pardon of his son.

Almost none of the coverage explained that Hunter Biden was pardoned for offenses almost never prosecuted in the first place.

Because he was in recovery and not using at the time, Hunter Biden answered “no” on a gun permit application where it asked about drug addiction. While this may have been a ‘context needed’ response, according to the National Criminal Justice Association, almost no one gets prosecuted for grey or even false answers on a gun permit application. Similarly, the tax charges brought against Hunter Biden were for first time tax offenses related to mis-claimed expenditures; such charges are rarely brought against first-time offenders, and almost never result in jail time.

The rarity of similar, arms-length prosecutions in both cases supports a strong inference that Hunter was prosecuted for politics, not cause, as President Biden made clear.

On the surface, Biden’s justification echoed Trump’s repeated claims of victimhood, but there’s no factual comparison. Lying about expenses on a personal tax return, or drug use on a permit for a gun that was never used, isn’t in the same league as Trump inciting a violent mob to attack the U.S. capital. Nor is it anywhere near Trump asking a state official to find 11,000 votes to rig an election, decades of business and financial fraud, a jury finding of sexual abuse and defamation, or staggering emoluments from foreign governments.

ALSO READ: The Medicare Advantage trap: What they don’t tell you

Media malfeasance on parade

Since the pardon was announced, Fox News has churned non-stop false narratives equating the “Biden crime family” with Trump’s long litany of felonies. Fox News ran over 80 features covering the Biden pardon over the past week alone, yet to this day has still never factually discussed J6 or Trump’s role in it.

Fox similarly offers no criticism of Trump’s plan to install a psychopath to turn the FBI into a dragnet against American citizens. Kash Patel is so rabidly obsessed with Trump’s ‘revenge’ he’ll make J. Edgar Hoover look like a puppy. Fox calls Patel, who writes childrens books about a persecuted ‘King Donald,’ an “advocate for truth” who will use the FBI to “bust the deep state.”

Fox will continue to propagandize Trump to low-information voters in service to Murdoch’s and Trump donors’ deep-pocket interests and no surprise there. What is surprising is that the NYT and other mainstream outlets have engaged in similar malfeasance, continuing the same media double standard that helped return a felon to the presidency. The day Biden’s pardon was announced, The New York Times devoted nearly its entire cover page to the story, and, over the past week, has run at least 28 features covering the pardon, almost none supportive.

Self-righteous objections disregard reality

Critics are correct that Biden previously said he would not pardon his son. But Biden made this statement before an untethered criminal was re-elected who, post-election, has paraded his plans to abuse his office for un-American revenge.

Pundits also argue that the pardon weakens Democrats’ commitment to the rule of law, even though Trump issued pardons for far more consequential offenses. Trump pardoned his in-law Charles Kushner, and has offered him an ambassadorship, after Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 federal charges including witness tampering, violating election laws, and tax evasion. After Kushner found out members of his family were cooperating with authorities, he hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law and sent a videotape of the affair to his sister. Chris Christie, then-U.S. attorney, called it “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he had ever prosecuted.

Trump also pardoned Michael Flynn after he admitted he lied to the FBI to protect Trump in the Russia investigation. Along with Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, drug dealers and over 175 other defendants, the crimes Trump pardoned are venomous snake bites compared to Hunter Biden’s mosquito bite.

When Trump pardons J6 rioters who assaulted federal police and wanted to hang Mike Pence, the upset over Hunter’s pardon for lying on a form will look ridiculous.

Norm follows function

One pundit after another argues that Biden should honor norms, stand on ceremony, and throw his son to Trump’s lawless and vindictive FBI to prove a point.

If upholding norms resulted in anything like reciprocity, i.e., if it would lead Republicans to follow suit, standing on principle might have merit. But there is no evidence whatsoever that Trump’s enablers care about norms; if anything, ‘owning the libs’ and other juvenile ethos from the right require rejecting them.

Endorsing Biden’s pardon isn’t just a matter of disregarding norms already discarded by the other side. It’s a reality-based refusal to stand on a burning platform while the other side holds the torch. Any recollection of Trump’s first term coupled with the pre-planned miscarriage of justice for his second makes objecting to Biden’s pardon look naïve to the point of virtue signaling.

Biden needs to pardon everyone in Trump’s crosshairs

If anything, Biden needs to keep the pardon ink flowing as Trump showcases the most dangerous and unqualified cabinet in American history, expressly assembled to take down his “domestic enemies.” Biden should also initiate FBI background checks, immediately, for any nominees Trump refuses to vet.

In light of Trump’s public vow to wreck the government and the people in it, Biden should use his remaining time in office to issue blanket pardons to those on Patel’s target list, including prominent Republicans like Liz Cheney of Wyoming, whom Trump says “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee.”

Trump’s sinister threats of vengeance against every American who lawfully sought to hold him accountable for his crimes are rapidly materializing. Instead of enabling Trump’s reign of terror by letting it unfold as Trump, Patel, Hegseth and other blood-thirsty goons have threatened, Biden has the pardon power to preemptively kneecap it, and he should use it.

A president’s duty to protect and defend demands no less.

ALSO READ: The Medicare Advantage trap: What they don’t tell you

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take

an 2 24

Fox & Friends credits November jobs gains to “Donald Trump's victory”

12/06/24

===

mma 12 4 24

The nomination of Pete Hegseth — the weekend Fox & Friends host Donald Trump selected to serve as defense secretary — is in trouble. Weeks of disturbing stories about Hegseth’s character and competence have Republican senators sitting on the fence, while Trump himself is reportedly contemplating other options.

But Hegseth’s Fox colleagues, who initially ignored the reports, have finally come to his defense over the last day, setting up a potential test of the influence the right-wing propaganda network will hold over the second Trump administration.

Hegseth is wildly underqualified to lead the Pentagon. The defense secretary’s job is to oversee a massive bureaucracy with millions of military and civilian employees and a budget in the hundreds of billions, and while Hegseth is a decorated military veteran, he has no experience managing such a large organization.

For Trump, however, Hegseth has the skills and experience required for any position: The former president likes his work on TV.

Hegseth spent the past decade as a Fox talking head. In that role, he pontificated about the perils of allowing women to serve in combat roles, defended U.S. service members and contractors who had been accused or convicted of war crimes, and floated military assaults on Iran and North Korea.

Along the way, Hegseth relentlessly propagandized on Trump’s behalf, which made him an influential figure during Trump’s first presidency. His selection to run the Pentagon was not an aberration — a slew of current and former network personalities could join Hegseth in the second Trump administration thanks to the incoming president’s Fox obsession.

But relying on Fox to vet cabinet nominees has left something to be desired when it comes to Hegseth, who has been battered by a series of devastating reports:

Fox’s right-wing propagandists and “news side” reporters alike remained silent about these controversies, as CNN’s Brian Stelter reported on Tuesday, instead using euphemisms about how Hegseth was facing “problems about his personal conduct” and is “headed for a tough confirmation.”

“In effect, Fox has insulated its conservative audience from reports that might dim their perception of Hegseth and Trump, instead offering viewers a safe space where their existing beliefs are reinforced by sympathetic hosts and guests,” Stelter wrote.

With Fox on the sidelines, GOP senators backed away from supporting Hegseth’s nomination. Trump himself reportedly began looking at other options for the Defense Department, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another Fox favorite.

But Hegseth’s Fox colleagues finally rallied to his defense on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, as his nomination reportedly faced an “absolutely critical” juncture.

After NBC News reported Tuesday night that Hegseth “drank in ways that concerned his colleagues at Fox News, according to 10 current and former Fox employees” and had at times smelled of alcohol on the set, Hegseth’s Fox & Friends weekend co-host Will Cain organized public denials from network employees and testimonials to their former colleague’s character.

Fox & Friends’ co-hosts on Wednesday morning offered several minutes of praise for Hegseth, denials of the reports about him, and attacks on what they termed a media “witch hunt.” “No, we will not succumb to the left’s playbook,” Emily Compagno said. “We will not succumb to Kavanaugh becoming a verb in that the left likes to wield the media and a very public witch hunt to thwart the possibility for actual success.”

They hosted Hegseth’s mother later in the show, who defended her son, saying that he “doesn't misuse women” and that while he “has been through some difficult things. … I would just say that some of those attachments or descriptions are just not true, especially anymore.”

She also made a direct appeal to Trump himself.

Hegseth himself remains defiant, and he will reportedly sit down tonight with Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier for an interview aimed at an audience of one — Trump, who will almost certainly be watching as he decides whether to keep pushing for Hegseth’s nomination or cut him loose.

With Hegseth’s Fox friends trying to preserve his spot at Defense he has a chance, but their effort may be too little, too late.

===

mma

Fox guests and medical contributors encouraged Trump's worst COVID impulses. Now they're running the show.

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 11/26/24 mma

Then-President Donald Trump repeatedly favored the Fox News hosts and guests he saw on his television screen over federal health policy experts as he managed the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and it had calamitous consequences. He's going even further as he prepares for his second term, picking familiar faces from the right-wing propaganda network to run the government health bureaucracy.

Trump, a Fox obsessive, staffed his first administration with at least 20 former Fox personalities, and he continues to rely on that method as he stocks his second one. But the network’s dominance among Trump’s announced picks to carry out his second-term health policy is nonetheless striking.

Anti-vaccine activist and Fox hero Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He will potentially oversee former Fox contributor Dr. Marty Makary at the Food and Drug Administration, Fox medical contributor Dr. Janette Nesheiwat as U.S. surgeon general, and frequent Fox guests Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Mehmet Oz at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (Bhattacharya has not been formally announced but is reportedly the top pick for the position.)

These picks, to an extent, show Trump aligning his health policy hires with his own Fox-molded views.

As president during the pandemic, he clashed with his official advisers when they contradicted what he was hearing from Fox personalities. The result was often chaos in decision-making, implementation, and public messaging.

Makary, Bhattacharya, Oz, and Nesheiwat received regular Fox airtime because on issues like the use of untested drugs such as hydroxychloroquine or nonpharmaceutical interventions like office and school closures, they tended to hew close to the Fox line — which also became the Trump line. If another pandemic hits, it is possible that they will be able to mitigate Trump’s worst impulses; they have real medical credentials, and Trump is likely to have greater confidence in them due to their shared past views.

But while Trump’s promotion of COVID-19 vaccines through Operation Warp Speed was an unalloyed triumph in his first term, Kennedy is a crank who was openly hostile to the drugs. And other members of the second-term team regularly went on Fox to warn about the purported health impacts of the vaccines and criticize mandates to ensure their use. That does not bode well for the prospect of a successful response should another pandemic hit during the next four years.

RFK Jr. at HHS is a Fox-fueled disaster for health policy

Fox hosts and other right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson spent 18 months irresponsibly championing Kennedy as part of a strategy to return Trump to the White House. The network regularly promoted him as a Democratic candidate, then showered him with praise and vouched for his health views after Carlson ensured that he endorsed Trump.

The result is that Kennedy — who has pushed debunked claims about childhood vaccination causing autism, questioned the well-established science over whether HIV actually causes AIDS, and promoted kooky conspiracy theories about 5G cellular towers and chemtrails — is Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy was among the biggest U.S. sources of anti-vaccine misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic, terming the COVID-19 vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Other noted anti-vaccine figures and fringe crackpots claim to be advising him on the transition.

He also suggested that the pandemic may have been “planned,” that public health efforts taken in response constituted “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare,” and that the virus itself had been “ethnically targeted” to afflict “Caucasians and Black people” while sparing “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese."

Several other Trump picks for top health posts were heavily featured during the Fox’s coronavirus coverage.

Oz, the television personality and grifter Trump selected to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, became a Fox regular in 2020. He made scores of network appearances at the start of the pandemic, particularly championing hydroxychloroquine, the antimalarial drug that right-wing media figures promoted as a treatment for or preventative to COVID.

Oz’s commentary attracted the attention of Trump, who reportedly urged aides to consult with the TV doctor about the outbreak. Oz subsequently ran for the U.S. Senate with the support of Fox star and Trump adviser Sean Hannity, but he came up short in the 2022 midterms.

Makary, Nesheiwat, and Bhattacharya also seemingly became Fox regulars because of their willingness to contradict COVID-19 guidance from federal public health agencies on its airwaves.

FDA selection Makary — who argued in a February 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed that the U.S. would reach “herd Immunity by April” — used his Fox platform in the months leading up to the emergence of the deadly delta variant to criticize public health officials for warning of new strains of the virus. He also criticized vaccine mandates, particularly for children, citing the vaccine’s purported health risks.

Reported NIH pick Bhattacharya — a signatory of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, which called for building up herd immunity through “natural infection” — likewise used his time in Fox’s spotlight to criticize vaccine mandates. He agreed with Fox host Laura Ingraham during an August 2021 segment that the FDA approved COVID-19 vaccines “too fast,” saying, “The FDA approval does not change the fact that we don't have long-term safety data with the vaccine."

And Nesheiwat, the Fox medical contributor Trump selected as surgeon general, promoted the use of supplemental zinc as a COVID-19 treatment and repeatedly highlighted the purported health risks of vaccination for children and young men.

Their commentary was part of a massive and effective effort by Fox to undermine the COVID-19 vaccination program. Now, if confirmed, they will be running major federal health bureaucracies.

Trump regularly leaned on Fox’s programming and personalities for advice, and the network shaped both his worldview and his administration’s actions. No event demonstrated the extent of the network’s influence more than his response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump didn’t treat COVID’s initial spread as an emergency because Fox was telling him that the media and Democrats were deliberately exaggerating the danger it posed.

He propped up hydroxychloroquine because the network told him it could be a miracle cure, refused to wear masks or socially distance because its hosts said those interventions didn’t work, and then urged the swift reopening of the economy they demanded.

He cut off support to the World Health Organization because one of Fox's stars suggested it and selected a White House adviser from the network’s green room to implement a “herd immunity” strategy.

The result was mass death.

The saving grace of the Trump pandemic response was Operation Warp Speed, an innovative program that sped the development of safe, effective vaccines against the virus. But Trump was out of office by the time the vaccines were deployed, and Fox responded with a yearslong campaign against the drugs. Fox regulars like Makary, Nesheiwat, and Bhattacharya pitched in by criticizing the safety of the vaccines or mandates for their use.

The four doctors Trump picked from Fox’s airwaves do have real medical credentials, and their selections have received some praise from public health experts.

Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist, said Nesheiwat is “a good appointment,” describing her as “very smart, thoughtful, interested in learning.”

Dr. Ashish Jha, who served in President Joe Biden’s White House, called the appointments of Makary, Oz, and Bhattacharya “pretty reasonable,” adding: “I have plenty of policy disagreements with them. They are smart and experienced. We will need them to do well.”

Indeed, they may take office as H5N1 bird flu spreads in American livestock and from livestock to people. If that virus makes the jump to human-to-human transmission, the U.S. health bureaucracy will be forced to grapple with another deadly pandemic.

Focusing specifically on Bhattacharya, Slow Boring’s Matt Yglesias offered the best-case scenario for how Trump’s health appointees could impact a pandemic response:

Bhattacharya’s criticisms of nonpharmaceutical intervetions during 2020 went further than I would have, and I don’t agree with him per se. That said, he is well-credentialed and smart and also aligned with Trump on the substantive question.

Four years ago, Trump had a lot of people in place who he didn’t have confidence in and didn’t listen to, and then he had a lot of unqualified people articulating his views.

Bhattacharya can do what an executive branch official is supposed to do and channel Trump-style views in a professional way.

What’s more, precisely because his anti-NPI credentials are unimpeachable, if a much deadlier virus comes around that shifts Trump’s sense of the cost-benefit balance, he would be the right person to deliver that message.

But as he further notes, “the most effective weapon against Covid was pharmaceutical interventions” — and in Kennedy, Trump has selected “an anti-vaccine crank” as Bhattacharya’s boss.

That means things could get bad fast.

---

rww 12 24

12/04/2024

by

Kyle Mantyla

The Court appears likely to uphold bans on gender-affirming care, and may gut the rules barring all forms of sex discrimination in the process.

President-elect Donald Trump announced he would be in person to receive the “Fox Patriot of the Year Award” at Thursday night’s Patriot Awards in Long Island.

Anonymity has long been a tactic used by extremists to spread their ideology while avoiding social consequences, from Klansmen hoods to online pseudonyms.

With Trump returning to the presidency, though, Truth & Liberty no longer seems content to parrot Barton’s rewriting of the nation’s founding. Now, they are extending [David] Barton’s tactics to subjects far more recent – they are rewriting the history of the last four years, and they are doing it for the exact same reason they cling to their rewritten version of the founding: to justify what they plan to do next.

Penelope Hegseth, the mother of Donald Trump’s current and embattled nominee for U.S. Secretary of Defense, appeared on the cable network where her son Pete works, to urge the U.S. Senate, and especially “female Senators,” to disregard media reports—which include allegations of sexual misconduct, excessive alcohol abuse, financial mismanagement of two veterans’ organizations, and tattoos suggesting a link to Christian nationalism. She insisted her son is a changed man and should be confirmed.

===

===---

did fox use trans?

aha // bolster neg attack ads dark $

no lnx

alternet-

Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, the Democrats will live in Trump’s America

Donald Trump gestures next to Patty Morin, whose daughter Rachel was killed in Maryland last year, during a campaign rally at Santander Arena in Reading, Pennsylvania, U.S., November 4, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

John Stoehr November 21, 2024

It takes time for things to stick properly, so please bear with me while I say again that Kamala Harris did not lose the election because of things she said. She lost because of things Donald Trump said she said.

So Democratic Party critics are basing their criticism not on what Harris said but on what Trump said she said, as they are accepting as true the allegations of the president-elect against the vice president.

By focusing on things that Trump said she said, rather than on things she said, these critics are missing the real lesson from the 2024 election – that her policies were not the determining factor in her defeat. It was the ear-splitting volume of the accusations against her and the absence of equal and opposite accusations against him.

In the final weeks of the election, the Trump campaign spent more than $29 million on television ads attacking Harris on trans rights. It was “by far, the biggest focal point when it comes to Trump’s ad spending — one of the best barometers of messaging priority there is,” wroteThe Bulwark’s Marc Caputo on October 24. “By contrast, the campaign has spent $5 million over that same time period on TV ads on the economy, making that topic their fifth-most emphasized.”

According to a new study by a Democratic pollster, Trump’s attack ads largely explain the outcome of the election. The report calculated the percentage of swing voters who voted for Trump in the belief that Harris supported federal funding of transgender surgeries on undocumented immigrants. It was a whopping 83 percent.

Conclusion:

“These voters — who remained open to persuasion until the very end — delivered not just a rejection of Harris but what they believed the Democratic Party stands for, absorbing rightwing narratives.”

Harris didn’t lose because of things she said.

She lost because of things Trump said she said.

Critics of the Democratic Party will point out that, ackshually, Harris did say she supported access to gender-transition care for undocumented immigrants. But that was once, in 2019, during her first run, and it wasn’t a campaign pledge. She wasn’t running on it. She gave an affirmative answer to an ACLU questionnaire. This year, her campaign explicitly rejected the questionnaire as having any bearing on her platform as the 2024 nominee. Indeed, she did what critics say she should do. She backed away from lefty woke things like trans rights.

And it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter because what she said, the substance of her message wasn’t as important to the outcome of the election as the volume of it, which is to say, the substance of what she said could not be heard through the din of the rightwing media apparatus. As media expert Matthew Sheffield said today, nothing was going to get through that, not even the shared reality of the economy. “Through seven TV channels, more than 1,500 talk-radio stations, and millions of social media posts. Republicans sold a fictional narrative about the economy to unsuspecting Americans. Trump inherited a strong economy from Obama and then destroyed it. Democrats never told the story.”

They couldn’t. No one was listening, because no one could hear it. Trump’s attack ads worked in tandem with thousands of media sites, including the one formerly known as Twitter, that have been operating around the clock since 2020, often in parallel with the Washington press corps. They were able to take one small thing Harris said years ago and turn it into a caricature so ridiculous that a convicted felon like Donald Trump could look like a viable candidate by comparison.

It was so loud some voters didn’t know what the Democrats stand for.

And that includes some Democratic voters.

Harris won more votes than Trump did in 2020 (she now has 74.3 million to his 74.2), but she did not win as many as Joe Biden in 2020. (He won 81.3 million votes, the most ever, while Trump won 76.8 million this year, the second-most ever.) Where did they go?

You could say voter suppression laws, but I think a bigger source of “voter suppression” was lies and propaganda, directly or indirectly from rightwing media outlets or from anti-trans attack ads, or in the form of “false-flag efforts” funded by billionaires, including Twitter’s Elon Musk, to make Democratic voters feel like there’s no point in voting for Harris. “The entire goal of the campaign was to push her numbers down,” a top Trump adviser told the Post. Clearly, it worked.

The volume of the rightwing media apparatus, especially when it’s in sync with the Washington press corps, is so loud that it can feel like the ultimate arbiter of our political reality. As one CNN anchor put it this morning, this is Donald Trump’s America. We’re just living in it. Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, one that can meet bad info with good info, the Democrats will continue living in Trump’s America, too.

How Fox powered Trump’s first term — and what that means for his second

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 11/19/24 MMA

Fox News dominated wide swaths of federal decision-making during Donald Trump’s first presidency, as his administration effectively merged with the right-wing propaganda network that had propelled him to power.

It’s currently unclear how the battle for Trump’s attention will shake out in a second one — but here’s how his media diet influenced the U.S. government the last time he was in the White House.

Trump owed his 2016 political ascent to that right-wing media ecosystem. A longtime Fox regular, he was obsessed with the network’s programming and channeled its demagoguery on the campaign trail, winning over its audience, as well as upstart alt-right organs like Steve Bannon’s Breitbart.com. He dominated Fox’s airtime on the way to his primary campaign win, bending the network and the GOP to his will before garnering a narrow Electoral College majority.

Once Trump was in office, Fox became a state TV outlet that lavished him with praise and denounced his foes, and in doing so it gained unprecedented influence over the U.S. government. The hours Trump spent each day consuming the network’s content and speaking privately with its stars shaped his worldview and dictated his reaction to various events. Hundreds of his hyperaggressive, seemingly stream-of-consciousness tweets came in response to what he was seeing on his television, a phenomenon I dubbed the “Trump-Fox feedback loop.”

Fox’s employees affected wildly important policy decisions on matters of war and peace, and they turned right-wing tantrums into matters of national importance because the president of the United States happened to be tuning in.

It’s impossible to overstate how ridiculous — or dangerous — this Fox-Trump pipeline could be. At one point, after a Fox contributor turned to the camera and urged Trump to renounce his support for a bill, the president appeared to do so on Twitter, causing chaos on Capitol Hill. Later in his term, Trump put the full force of government behind a purported coronavirus “miracle cure” that he had seen touted on Fox but proved ineffective against the virus.

Below, I detail how Trump's communications, his administration’s personnel, and his administration’s actions on executive clemency, law enforcement investigations, domestic policy, and even military strikes all came to revolve around Fox during his first term.

Communications

Journalists struggled in the early days of Trump’s presidency to explain his Twitter activity. The sitting president’s often-hyperaggressive tweets would begin early in the morning and continue late into the night, skipping from topic to topic with little clear rhyme or reason.

While some attributed the pattern to strategic genius and others to mental instability, the truth was more prosaic: Trump was spending much of his days watching cable news, particularly Fox, and responding in real time to segments that captured his fancy.

I ultimately traced nearly 1,300 Trump tweets back to Fox News and its sister channel, Fox Business. He live-tweeted dozens of different Fox shows, with hundreds of his missives attributed to his favorite program, Fox & Friends, alone, on a bevy of topics. These live tweets — and thus, Fox’s coverage — often set the agenda for the broader news media, as reporters dropped whatever they were working on to cover the newsworthy comments from the TV-addled president.

Some of the Fox live tweets were a humorous sideshow — a June 2019 tweet about Mars and the moon that baffled journalists turned out to be Trump giving feedback to a NASA official he had just seen on Fox Business.

But Trump’s reactions to the network were often deadly serious: Based on what he saw on Fox, he raised tensions with foreign adversaries; demanded investigations of his political foes; lashed out at public officials with racist invective; denounced an array of journalists and media outlets; undermined the public health response to the coronavirus pandemic; and fueled the election fraud conspiracy theories that ultimately triggered the January 6 insurrection.

While Trump has in recent months at times feuded with Fox, that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to promote segments from its programming.

Trump’s unprecedented relationship with Fox created a revolving door between the network and his administration during his first term.

Trump relied on Fox as a staffing agency, filling the ranks of the federal government with familiar faces from his TV screen. At least 20 former Fox employees ended up working for the Trump administration in some capacity, a tally that included multiple Cabinet secretaries (Ben Carson and Elaine Chao), top White House aides (Kayleigh McEnany and John Bolton, among others), and U.S. ambassadors (Scott Brown and Georgette Mosbacher). Fox, in turn, hired at least 16 members of his administration for roles at the network or its parent company during his presidency or after it concluded.

Trump also relied on advice from Fox personalities who remained at the network. He reportedly spoke with Sean Hannity so frequently that White House aides described the Fox host as “the unofficial chief of staff.” He also brought Laura Ingraham into the White House to brief administration officials, patched Lou Dobbs into Oval Office meetings via speakerphone, and privately consulted with Jeanine Pirro, Pete Hegseth, and Tucker Carlson.

These relationships proved so strong that some of the unofficial Fox advisers dislodged official Trump appointees: Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigned after losing a power struggle with Pirro, as did Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen with Dobbs, U.S. Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer with Hegseth, and Bolton with Carlson.

Trump appears to be returning to the same source as he begins filling out his second administration. His initial spate of picks included five former Fox employees: Fox & Friends Weekend host Hegseth for defense secretary, former host Mike Huckabee for U.S. ambassador to Israel, and former contributors Tulsi Gabbard, Tom Homan, and Michael Waltz as director of national intelligence, “Border Czar,” and national security adviser.

Fox’s coverage and the influence of its personalities permeated every aspect of federal policy during Trump's first term, including but not limited to:

Domestic actions. Trump blew up a potential immigration deal after consulting with Hannity. He abruptly changed his trade policy with China due to criticism from Dobbs and Brian Kilmeade. He triggered a partial government shutdown after goading from Fox hosts; awarded a contract to build border wall due to a Fox PR campaign. He backed an ineffective treatment as a coronavirus “miracle cure” because it was championed by Fox stars. And in response to critical Carlson segments, he terminated a federal antisegregation plan, abandoned police reform legislation, and launched an administration-wide turn against diversity training.

Foreign actions.Trump launched the Ukraine abuse of power scheme that resulted in his first impeachment in response to coverage from Hannity. He publicly criticized South Africa’s government after seeing Carlson promote false white nationalist talking points, leading South African to condemn his statement. He responded to a Fox segment about North Korea by threatening nuclear war. And he both cut off funding to the World Health Organization and repeatedly called off military strikes on Iran due to Carlson monologues.

Executive clemency. Fox influenced at least 25 of Trump’s acts of executive clemency. He gave pardons and commutations to individuals whose cases had the support of Trump-loving network personalities and to clients of prominent pro-Trump lawyers who regularly appeared on its shows. Individuals seeking clemency and their family members and lawyers used the president’s favorite programs to request clemency from him directly. Hegseth in particular played a key role in lobbying for clemency for alleged and convicted war criminals.

Law enforcement investigations. Trump repeatedly demanded — and received — law enforcement action against his perceived foes in response to coverage he saw about them on Fox, including John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Google, and the Russia probe.

Who knows what the second term will bring.

*This post is adapted in part from myop-ed at MSNBC.com

===

===

fox staff agy

November 15, 2024, edition of WNYC's On the Media

MATT GERTZ (SENIOR FELLOW, MEDIA MATTERS): Donald Trump is using Fox News as a staffing agency.

BROOKE GLADSTONE (HOST): Matt Gertz is the senior fellow at the left-leaning Media Matters for America. He says it's worth revisiting all that we learned in the first term about Trump's relationship with his cable news channel of choice.

GERTZ: Fox & Friendshas, for a long time, been his favorite show. Pete Hegseth, the potentially incoming defense secretary, has been working as a co-host of Fox & Friends'weekend edition for the last several years.

GLADSTONE: What should we know about him and his career trajectory from Fox News contributor to secretary of defense nominee?

GERTZ: What Hegseth was able to do, after catching Trump's eye, was get Donald Trump to sign on to his own aims, which during Trump's first administration was securing executive clemency for several service members who had been accused or convicted of war crimes.

GLADSTONE: Yeah, the killing of civilians.

GERTZ: He put family members of various accused or convicted war criminals on the show to talk up how they had been persecuted.

...

GERTZ: This is how Trump gets his news. This is how his worldview is changed. It's one segment at a time.

GLADSTONE: He has a certain set of skills, certainly as a Fox News host, right? But secretary of defense needs a different set of skills.

GERTZ: Right. The set of skills that you need for being a Fox News host is understanding how to push the buttons of the MAGA faithful. And the way that Fox hosts traditionally do that is by making those viewers afraid, making those viewers angry.

GLADSTONE: Providing enemies?

GERTZ: Providing enemies. Obviously that is not the job of defense secretary. We're talking about a sprawling bureaucracy that employs nearly 3 million service members and civilian employees that has a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars. It's a serious job for serious people.

GLADSTONE: You've also noticed that this revolving door also works the other way. Several Trump staffers signed on with Fox News after Trump left office.

GERTZ: During or after his term, yes. Tom Homan was previously the head of ICE. After he retired from ICE in summer of 2018, he got a job at Fox News. He would denounce Democrats for standing against Trump's border policies. He would call for evermore draconian measures. He would say the things that Donald Trump wanted to hear.

...

GERTZ: Now he's gone through the revolving door; now he's coming back into the administration.

GLADSTONE: You have observed that the more often you go on Fox News, the more likely you are to clinch one of these top jobs in the Trump administration. One Fox frequent flyer was Congressman Matt Gaetz, just nominated attorney general.

GERTZ: We have counted at least 347 weekday Fox appearances that Gaetz did from August 2017 through Election Day of 2024. He's actually not the most frequent Fox guest to be taking a jump to the administration though. His Florida colleague, Rep. Michael Walz, who is Trump's pick for national security adviser, actually made at least 569 weekday Fox appearances, 176 since January 2023, which is the most of any member of Congress in that period.

GLADSTONE: Wow. The last nominee -- Tulsi Gabbard -- is a former Democrat-turned-MAGA Fox News contributor and more. Is that how she caught Trump's eye?

GERTZ: In Gabbard's case, she became a favorite of Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News star host. And as she underwent a sort of political transformation that brought her further and further onto the right, Fox was an opportunity for her to rebrand herself. Tulsi Gabbard is the pick for director of national intelligence. It's a position that oversees the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies. It's also responsible for the presidential daily brief, though that is somewhat less important in a Donald Trump administration, as Donald Trump rather famously ignores his daily briefing. He would take advice from Fox News hosts, either through their programs or he'd reach out to them directly. Those are the experts he wanted to hear from, not people with actual subject matter expertise.

mma

A comprehensive review of the revolving door between Fox and the Trump administration

07/22/19 1:43 PM EDT

  1. ### With “Border Czar” Tom Homan, Trump restarts the revolving door between Fox and his administration

11/12/24 11:03 AM EST

  1. ### The MAGA propaganda machine helped carry Trump back to the White House — and it’s not done poisoning America

11/07/2

November 15, 2024, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered

BEN FERGUSON (GUEST): I've never seen so many conservatives, by the way, now looking at following the money of Big Pharma, and realizing, like, hey, maybe we're actually being taken advantage of. Maybe they want to throw every single vaccine at you to make more money. And we know how much money they made off of vaccines. We also know that doctors were not honest with the American people because they were getting bonuses for how many vaccines they were putting out there. And the American people and mothers will not forget that. mma

===

mma? Pete Hegseth's book includes complaints about “Muslims’ birth rates,” praise for “crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes” 11/12/24

===

MMA

Fox News interviews fringe conspiracy theorist Dom Lucre, calling him a “journalist”

Weeks ago, Lucre baselessly accused an assistant FBI director of being complicit in a Trump assassination attempt. Fox News is now hosting him as a “journalist.”

Written by Courtney Hagle

Research contributions from Alex Kaplan

Published 11/12/24

On November 8, a Fox News “straight news” program interviewed content creator Dom Lucre, referring to him as a “journalist.” Lucre has a history of pushing QAnon-related conspiracy theories, spreading outlandish claims about high-level Democrats, and pushing 2020 election denial.

Dominick McGee, known online as Dom Lucre, has a history of pushing baseless conspiracy theories as a right-wing internet personality. Lucre capitalized on 2020 election denial conspiracy theories to build a platform geared toward the right, and he went to Washington, D.C. to protest the 2020 election results on January 6, 2021. Since then, he has used his platform to push a slew of conspiracy theories, occasionally putting real people in the crosshairs of his claims.

* Lucre also accused assistant FBI director Janeen Diguiseppi of “giving the shooter instructions” based on his analysis of a video from the shooting, where he claimed a woman sitting behind Trump was Diguiseppi. This was debunked by the FBI.

Last Friday, anchor Trace Gallagher hosted Lucre on Fox News @ Night, introducing and labeling him simply as a “journalist.” Lucre claimed that Democrats ran a campaign that was “false” and “complete propaganda from day one.” Lucre also highlighted Gen Z and the “rise of streamers” made a difference in Trump’s campaign, arguing that Vice President Kamala Harris is the “past, she does not have the future, which we are pushing forward. Trump was the way forward.” Lucre concluded that this space is “controlling the culture, and I believe it is shifting towards conservatism.” Gallagher thanked Lucre for the “great information.”

===

MMA 11 24

The revolving door between Donald Trump’s Fox News propaganda outlet and his incoming administration is already beginning to turn.

Trump announced that Fox News contributor Tom Homan will serve as “The Border Czar” with responsibility for “our Nation’s Borders” as well as “all Deportation of Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin” in a Sunday post to Truth Social. Homan joined Fox two months after his June 2018 retirement as acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director during Trump’s first term.

Homan’s hiring points to the influential role Fox will play during the second Trump administration. The notoriously Fox-obsessed president-elect hired at least 20 officials who previously worked at the network during his first term, including Cabinet secretaries and top White House aides. Fox, in turn, put more than a dozen members of the Trump orbit on its payroll during and after his presidency.

Homan highlighted the importance of his presence on Fox in a Monday appearance on Fox & Friends, Trump’s favorite morning broadcast.

“I have been on this network for years complaining about what this administration did to this border,” Homan said. “I have been yelling and screaming about it, telling them what they need to do to fix it.”

Trump subsequently posted the segment on Truth Social.

Indeed, Trump has had many opportunities over the years to see Homan using Fox’s platform to promote their shared brand of anti-immigrant vitriol. Homan made at least 441 weekday appearances on Fox from August 2017 through Election Day 2024, according to the Media Matters database, with 80 of those appearances coming since January 2023.

As a member of the Trump administration, Homan made the case for the then-president’s anti-immigrant agenda on his network of choice while reportedly serving as the "intellectual ‘father’” of Trump’s cruel family separation policy.

On Fox’s airwaves, Homan regularly fomented fear of immigrants and demanded radical and inhumane policies in response to their purported invasion.

Homan also appeared in the far-right fever swamps, pushing the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory in an appearance on the online program of a Hitler-praising antisemite.

And during the 2024 presidential campaign, Homan promised that if Trump were elected, Homan would “run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen” in which “no one’s off the table.”

Homan isn’t the only incoming Trump official to benefit from Fox’s megaphone. Several other people Trump reportedly plans to nominate for high-ranking positions in his administration have spent the last several years regularly appearing on the president-elect’s favored network.

According to the Media Matters database, from August 2017 through Election Day 2024:

Trump’s early staffing selections suggest that his administration will be every bit as intertwined with Fox as it was in his first term. And if Fox is helping with personnel, policy won’t be far behind.

  1. //### A comprehensive review of the revolving door between Fox and the Trump administration

07/22/19

  1. ### Fox contributor Tom Homan is the “intellectual ‘father’” of family separation

08/08/22

  1. ### The Trump-to-Fox personnel pipeline: A comprehensive review

04/09/21

---

===

mma

How Fox News has been misinforming its viewers about abortion

Written by Jane Lee, Isabella Corrao & Helena Hind

Published 11/04/24 mma

In the months leading up to the first presidential election since Roe v. Wade was overturned, Fox News has ignored the positive public health impacts of Vice President Kamala Harris’ pro-choice policy proposals. The network has instead portrayed abortion as an insignificant issue in the election, accused Democrats of fearmongering that former President Donald Trump and Republicans want to restrict access to reproductive rights, and falsely claimed that Democrats want no restrictions on abortions to the point of allowing so-called “post-birth” abortions.

Candidate positions on abortion — and Fox News spin

* After co-host Jessica Tarlov criticized Trump for laughing about a Georgia woman who died after doctors delayed lifesaving treatment for abortion-related complications, Gutfeld responded, “He should've said, ‘It’s the Democrats have been lying about it, creating a completely false story.’” Fox News, *The Five*, [10/16/24; ProPublica, 9/16/24]

* Fox News neglected to cover reporting about the deaths of two women in Texas who sought abortion care during medical emergencies. The network once again failed to inform its viewers of the fatal consequences of abortion bans at the state level. Media Matters, [11/4/24]

The Five* co-host Jeanine Pirro argued that more women were concerned about the combined issues of economy and immigration than abortion: “When women talk about immigration, when you put the economy and immigration together, it beats abortion by 32 points.” Fox News, *The Five*, [10/16/24]

* Denying that Trump supported a national abortion ban, co-host Ainsley Earhardt suggested that people in Alabama don’t want abortion rights, saying, “If you live in New York, you probably always get an abortion. If you live in Alabama, maybe not. I don't know, but it’s whatever you decide as the voter of the state.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [10/22/24]

* Fox News contributor Kellyanne Conway claimed that “Tim Walz himself allows babies that survive an abortion — it’s rare, but it happens — allows them to not have standard of care, warmth, food, water, liquids. You just have to let them ‘expire.’”She continued, “That’s not what pro-choice women say they mean when they call themselves pro-choice.” Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [9/13/24]

===

Jesse Watters asks Hulk Hogan what role he would play in a potential Trump administration 10/31/24 MMA

===

slow burn podcast series

empir: only show that makes you dumber?

===

no lnx

alternet-Fox News is the reason the race is close

Sabrina Haake, Raw Story November 02, 2024

This is my last column before the election. I am as tired of writing about politics as most Americans are tired of reading, thinking, and hearing about it. The stress of this make-or-break Democracy test feels cruel and unusual. Cruel because of what’s at stake, unusual because it is unrelenting.

For people who inform themselves through fact-based media outlets, the most commonly heard question is, how is this race even close? Of all the craziness we’ve seen and heard, the Nazi-adjacent rhetoric, the venomous threats, the crazed narcissist making the nation’s struggles all about himself, how can half the country still support him? How can half our fellow citizens vote for him, knowing what they know about him? Are they crazy? Are they hateful?

The short answer, IMHO, is no. Most Trump voters are not Nazis, voting for Trump because of who Trump is. MAGA mostly just wants to be entertained, they enjoy the carnival of camaraderie. They don’t know who Trump really is, what his policies really are, because Fox News, again, deliberately hides it from them.

People who watch Fox News support Trump

Forty-three percent of the country watches Fox News, which correlates directly with the percentage of voters who support Trump over Harris.

ALSO READ: The 101 worst things about Trump's sham presidency

More telling, most Fox viewers don’t diversify the information they consume: Viewers with consistently conservative political views get them from a single outlet—Fox News—to a much greater degree than independents and liberals, who inform themselves from a variety of sources. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly half (47%) of consistently conservative Americans get their government and political news just from Fox News.

Fox News topped primetime viewership in August 2024. According to a recent Deadline Report, Fox News’ The Five was “the top regularly scheduled program in cable news, averaging 3.29 million viewers, followed by Jesse Watters Primetime with 2.97 million, Hannity with 2.61 million, Gutfeld! with 2.55 million and The Ingraham Angle with 2.44 million.”

Voters can’t act on what they don’t know

The high percentage of Americans hooked on Fox entertainment-sold-as-news escalates the risks inherent in Fox’s pro-Trump propaganda from fraudulent, to dangerous, to a national security threat. It elevates the stakes from “political speech,” protected by the 1st A, to weaponized disinformation. The difference is substantive, and both legislature and courts need to deal with it in a meaningful way.

For now, whenever there’s a news cycle unfavorable to Trump, Fox hosts either spin it in the opposite direction to help him, or, more frequently, they redirect their viewers to election topics deemed favorable to Trump, like the border. Over the past several months, Fox has focused obsessively on our broken immigration system, featuring dog whistles meant to frighten white people, but Fox hosts almost never mention how Trump intentionally killed the border bill just so he could campaign on it.

When Fox tires of showing black and brown people committing crimes, and lying about violent crime rates that have actually fallen, Fox programmers switch to pablum like popular hairstyles, dog breeds, and who eats ketchup on their omelets. Meanwhile, ominous and unprecedented national security warnings about the dangers of a second Trump administration, coming in from Trump’s own advisors, are hidden from Fox viewers.

Fox buried warnings from Trump’s own brass

Last week when news broke that John Kelly, Trump’s own Chief of Staff, wanted to warn Americans about Trump, including that Trump wanted generals more like Hitler’s and exhibited fascistic urges, Fox News re-directed viewers to Trump’s publicity stunt where he cosplayed at McDonalds. Fox ran dozens of insipid articles about Trump at McDonalds (Trump standing at the fry counter, Trump claiming Harris never worked there, Trump charming the customers at the drive-through window, etc.) Meanwhile, they reported almost nothing about John Kelly’s warning.

In one of two articles I saw about Kelly’s statements, Fox packaged it as a Harris ploy, reporting last week that, “The Harris campaign on Friday put out a letter penned by 13 ex-Trump administration officials seeking to bolster claims made by former President Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly…” The article then identified 13 fairly low-level Republicans who signed a letter warning about Trump, instead of the hundreds of high ranking Republican advisors issuing the same warnings.

Fox focused on Trump smiling in an apron to bury dire statements from heavy hitters including Mark Milley, the highest ranking military officer and Trump’s own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Fox News articles about other Republicans against Trump, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, are mostly led with misleading headlines against Democrats and Harris because the vast majority of people- 70 to 80%- read only the headlines.

Even after Trump said Liz Cheney should have 9 rifles pointed at her (execution squad style). Fox headlines spun the story against both Cheney and Harris.

Over 300 high ranking Republicans, including military and political leaders, have issued warnings against another Trump administration. As the NYT reports, the list includes “former defense secretaries Chuck Hagel and William S. Cohen; Robert B. Zoellick, former World Bank president; ex-CIA directors Michael V. Hayden and William H. Webster; former director of national intelligence John D. Negroponte; and former Massachusetts Governor William F. Weld,” and former Trump administration officials Miles Taylor and Olivia Troye.

Or, as Fox described the letter from 13 Republicans, “Mike Pence who has signed multiple letters from Republicans attacking Trump, signed this letter, as well.”

No matter what happens Tuesday, we need fairness in the news

One thing we know for sure about domestic politics is that when the pendulum swings, it always swings back, the question is when, and after what.

When the day finally comes that our Supreme Court isn’t ethically compromised—and that day will come— voters will challenge Fox News (and likely Elon Musk) for aiding and abetting election fraud, as Dominion did. The next time around, the outcome for Fox won’t just be the cost of doing business.

We’ve legislated truth in the news before, and we were better for it. In 1969, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the Fairness Doctrine, which required all news broadcasters to give fair coverage and opposing views on matters of public importance. Balancing publishers’ first amendment rights against the right of the public to be well informed, the Red Lion Court ruled that the public’s right to access full information takes priority over the First Amendment concerns of broadcasters.

“It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited market-place of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market.” This is the same legal analysis that should be applied to today’s “political speech defense.” Bottom line, there’s a difference between free speech and weaponized speech, and the law needs to catch up with rapidly changing social media, AI, and monopolized town squares.

Legal change will eventually come, it’s not if but when. We aren’t meant to hate our neighbors, as much as Putin, Xi and Trump want us to. As Harris said, there’s a better way. In the meantime, take a walk in the woods. Leave your phone at home. Vote, speak up, write a column, drive your neighbors to the polls. Then let it go.

ALSO READ: A stupefying poll shows Harris breathing down Trump’s neck in Kansas. Here’s what that means.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the Substack, The Haake Take.

===

mma

Fox News repeatedly misled viewers about Virginia’s last-minute voter purge

Fox figures are falsely claiming the Biden administration is “pushing for noncitizens to vote in the 2024 election”

Written by Casey Wexler

Published 10/31/24 mma

In separate segments, Fox News legal editor Kerri Kupec Urbahn and network contributor Jonathan Turley both falsely suggested that the Biden administration is fighting against Virginia’s purge of 1,600 voters to push for noncitizens to vote. In reality the administration and civil rights groups sued to protect Virginia citizens who are legally allowed to vote — not to allow noncitizens to cast ballots — and objected to the state’s move to purge voter rolls less than 90 days before an election, which violates federal law.

Since August 7, state officials have removed 1,600 Virginia voters who were supposedly suspected to be noncitizens from the voter rolls. However, subsequent reporting found “the program has also erroneously ensnared U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote.” From NPR:

Civil rights groups and the U.S. Department of Justice had sued Virginia over the program earlier this month. U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ruled Friday the state program violated federal law by systematically removing voters too close to a federal election.

Under the National Voter Registration Act, during the 90 days before an election, states must pause certain kinds of voter list maintenance programs that systematically remove voters to ensure mistakes aren't made too close to the election.

On October 30, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that Virginia did not have to restore those 1,600 people to the voter rolls before Election Day.

Discussing the previous lower-court decision on October 29, Urbahn did not acknowledge the missed 90-day time frame or the citizens removed from the rolls. Instead, Urbahn suggested “the Biden administration [is] pushing for noncitizens to vote in the 2024 election” and called the lawsuit to prevent citizens from being purged “bizarre” and “a bad look for DOJ,” adding that “it could have been to send a message.”

Video

CitationFrom the October, 29, 2024, edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom

On The Story with Martha MacCallum, Turley claimed that the Biden administration was actively suing specifically to allow noncitizens to vote: “You have people saying I'm not a citizen and I want to vote and we're saying we can't do that, and now the Biden-Harris administration is saying you will do that with the help of these federal courts.”

---

timing? right after MSG nazi rally and VPH elipse in which she called out

after bret b clip fail apology?

mma

Fox’s John Roberts denies that Trump has talked about deploying the military against Americans

In an interview on Fox, Trump recently suggested using troops against “the enemy within”

Written by Bushra Sultana

Published 10/30/24

On the October 30 edition of America Reports, Fox anchor John Roberts falsely claimed that Donald Trump has never said that he would use the military against the American people, claiming instead, “He said that he would bring in the National Guard to quell demonstrations that turned violent.”

Roberts was seemingly referring to Trump’s comments in an interview from early October in which Fox’s Maria Bartiromo asked the former president about “outside agitators” creating chaos on Election Day. Trump responded, “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” adding, “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. … It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

Roberts also ignored the larger context of Trump’s comments repeatedly calling Democrats and people who don’t support him “the enemy from within.” In an interview with Fox’s Howard Kurtz, Trump called Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) “an enemy from within,” claiming, “These are bad people. We have a lot of bad people. But when you look at ‘Shifty Schiff’ and some of the others, yeah, they are, to me, the enemy from within.” Trump has also repeatedly called mainstream media “the enemy of the people” since his 2016 election campaign.

Video

Share

CitationFrom the October 30, 2024, edition of Fox News' America Reports

JOSE ARISTIMUNO (FORMER DNC DEPUTY NATIONAL PRESS SECRETARY): On the disinformation, there's a whole lot of Republicans out there that are saying that Kamala Harris is a socialist when she's not. When you have a former president, on Donald Trump, that wants to militarize the Department of Justice, wants to use the military on the American people. He said it himself —

JOHN ROBERTS (ANCHOR): He never said that.

ARISTIMUNO: And he’s the one who doesn’t recognize elections. He doesn't recognize the 2020 election. That's what Nicolás Maduro does in Venezuela. So I invite my friends that are watching the program today, actually research of what these people are doing. Both Kamala and Donald Trump — look at their policies, look at their actions, not just their words. That's what's going to make a difference come November 5.

ROBERTS: Steve, quick final word to you, with the caveat that Donald Trump never said that he was going to sic the U.S. military on the American people. He said that he would bring in the National Guard to quell demonstrations that turned violent.

===

mma

Fox News has distorted three key Kamala Harris economic proposals

Written by Isabella Corrao & Alicia Sadowski

Research contributions from Jane Lee & Helena Hind

Published 10/30/24 mma

Since the start of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, Fox News personalities have complained that the vice president will not define her stances on policy issues. After Harris released detailed policy proposals, however, Fox figures changed their method of attack to instead take her proposals wildly out of context, distorting the intentions and hiding the potential benefits of her policies from their audience.

PROPOSAL: Harris’ offers a $6,000 child tax credit, which is built on previous iterations of the Child Tax Credit

* During the Biden administration, the America Rescue Plan Act of 2021 temporarily expanded the Child Tax Credit from $2,000 to $3,600 per child, resulting in a 30% decrease in childhood poverty rates. This expanded credit expired in 2022 and “millions of children were plunged back into poverty.” Now, Harris has proposed offering a $6,000 child tax credit for parents of newborns and making the tax credit fully refundable.

{ Watters argued that Harris’ failed promise of reparations has now led her to trying to “win the Black vote with free money and drugs.”}:Watters added: “Did Kamala even come up with this pitch? Or did her white handler sit around thinking, ‘Black people love handouts and getting high. Let's give this a shot.’” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [10/15/24]

Fox Noticias ignored “floating island of garbage” remarks about Puerto Rico from Trump's MSG rally

10/29/24 mma

---

Fox News, which routinely edits Trump appearances, spent over 1 hour covering CBS editing Harris interview

10/26/24 11:13 AM EDT

  1. ### Fox News' Bret Baier says Donald Trump's closing message has been “joyful”

10/25/24 MMA

---

While Fox News pushes false jobs claim, WSJ reports fracking is not even in the top 50 industries in Pennsylvania

10/25/24 mma

===

msnbc 10 24 NW DW tucker, ingraham and hannity had chance to do right on dominion/big lie but fail?

---

While Fox News pushes false jobs claim, WSJ reports fracking is not even in the top 50 industries in Pennsylvania

10/25/24 mma

===

Jesse Watters calls Gen. John Kelly's accusations that Donald Trump admired Nazis a “hoax” 10/23/24 MMA

---

Anti-abortion hecklers interrupted a Kamala Harris rally. Fox News and MAGA media turned them into culture war heroes — and Trump ran with it.

How Fox News manufactured outrage over anti-abortion Harris rally hecklers to smear Democrats as anti-Christian

Written by Helena Hind

Published 10/23/24 MMA

After Vice President Kamala Harris shut down anti-abortion hecklers at a campaign rally, Fox News pundits saw an opportunity to add a new misleading talking point to former President Donald Trump’s arsenal. Within days, the former president used Fox’s talking points as fodder to smear Democrats as anti-Christian on the campaign trail.

The exchange happened during an October 17 campaign rally, while Harris was speaking about reproductive rights. As she criticized Trump’s role in overturning Roe v. Wade, the vice president was interrupted by hecklers in the crowd.

IFrame Content

“Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally,” she retorted. “No, I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street.”

As the moment went viral on social media, another version of the clip gained traction among high-profile MAGA accounts alleging that Harris was specifically responding to a heckler saying “Jesus is Lord.”

IFrame Content

“Christians are not welcome in Kamala’s Democrat Party,” claimed TPUSA’s Charlie Kirk. “Vote accordingly.”

The talking point inevitably made its way from Fox News’ airwaves to Trump

The hecklers first appeared on the network during the October 20 edition of Fox & Friends Weekend. “This is our first time taking an interview with anybody,” one of them confirmed to co-host Will Cain, before alleging that he was kicked out of the rally for voicing his Christian beliefs.

Co-host Rachel-Campos Duffy solidified Fox’s version of the story with her question: “Luke said something about Jesus, right? ‘Jesus is King, Jesus is Lord,’ and she said, ‘You’re not welcome here.’ I want to know what you felt in that moment.”

The next day, October 21, Fox & Friends co-hosts Lawrence Jones, Ainsley Earhardt, and Brian Kilmeade continued to criticize Harris for supposedly disparaging Christianity. “I was shocked that any politician would put down the number one religion in our country,” Earhardt complained, before re-airing clips of the hecklers’ October 20 interview.

Later that day, host Laura Ingraham said Harris “sent a clear message to Christians: ‘You’re not welcome here.’”

Video

CitationFrom the October 21, 2024, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

The hecklers themselves also made an appearance in Ingraham’s show, repeating the right-wing media version of the story. A chyron reading “The Left’s anti-Christian rhetoric” briefly aired.

Sean Hannity hosted the hecklers on his radio show on October 22, one of whom alleged Harris was “publicly denouncing the name of the Lord.” The Fox host was happy to agree: “‘Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally because you believe in Jesus?’ I thought Democrats prided themselves in being open-minded.”

By October 22, the story had made its way to the Trump campaign. A video posted to his X account spliced an edited version of the Harris clip with a soundbite from a Trump speech: “While Kamala says that people who believe in Jesus don’t belong to her rallies, in our movement, we love Christians, we welcome believers, and we embrace followers of Jesus.”

IFrame Content

This is just another example of the stubborn Fox-Trump feedback loop, which has persisted well into 2024. As Election Day nears, the pundits will likely continue to manufacture outrage, and misleading stories, and jokes for the former president to repeat on the campaign trail.

===

Fox News' Bret Baier downplays Trump's former chief-of-staff saying the former president is a fascist who praised Hitler

10/23/24 mma

===

===

// kirk kashyap

How the Fox bubble is reacting to John Kelly calling Trump a fascist

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/23/24 mma

John Kelly, who once served as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, believes that the former president is a “fascist” and would seek to rule as a dictator if he returns to office in November, The New York Times reported on Tuesday evening. The paper published audio of an interview Kelly gave to the Times’ Michael Schmidt in which Kelly explained that Trump “prefers the dictator approach to government” and believes he should have “an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted.”

Kelly is not the only retired four-star general now sounding the alarm after working at the highest levels of the Trump administration: Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, has described him as “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person ever,” remarks reportedly echoed by Jim Mattis, Trump’s former secretary of defense. Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper calls Trump a “threat to democracy,” while former national security adviser John Bolton describes him as “unfit to be president.”

But while Trump’s top national security advisers have largely abandoned him, he retains the zealous loyalty of the counselors he relied on most of all during his presidency: the faithful hosts at Fox News.

### Fox’s Kelly response is silence and spin

Fox’s evening propaganda rotation of Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, and Greg Gutfeld all completely ignored Kelly’s clarion call on Tuesday night.

On Wednesday’s edition of Fox & Friends, the curvy couch crew avoided the Times story while attacking Kelly and Mattis as defiant, disloyal, partisan figures.

The hosts defended Trump from a report in The Atlantic, also published Tuesday, that Trump had been so fixated on wanting military leaders to truckle to his whims that he once said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

For co-host Brian Kilmeade, such a remark would be a reasonable response to what he characterized as insubordination by the likes of Kelly and Mattis.

“After a while, while being investigated, there were probably times where he [indecipherable] off,” Kilmeade said of Trump. “‘Wouldn't it be great if generals actually listen? Can you imagine if some people listened to the commander in chief?’ I could absolutely see that happening.”

“And they know it in context,” Kilmeade added, “But they said, ‘He could win. I’m going to stop him.’”

“I could absolutely see him going now, ‘You know what, it would be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do,’ knowing that's a third — maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis and whatever,” Kilmeade offered in a second segment.

### Fox guards its viewers from the truth about Trump

Fox’s early handling of Kelly’s warning that his former boss is a fascist is characteristic of the network’s strategy of suppressing unfavorable news about Trump.

Fox typically hides Republican dissent from its audience. Milley’s description of Trump as “fascist to the core” garnered only a handful of mentions on the network. Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, and the Republican speaker of the House during his tenure, Paul Ryan, both said in exclusive interviews on the network that they would not be supporting his campaign — only for Fox to bury that news as well. When several disaffected Republicans spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August, Fox did not air a secondof any of their speeches.

The network’s stars turned other prominent Republican Trump critics, like former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, into political punching bags, helping the former president drive them from office.

By helping Trump control the narratives his supporters are exposed to, Fox maintains his iron grip on the GOP base — and thus on the pliant Republican leadership. And next month, if the election is close and Trump declares victory, the right-wing information bubble Fox helps maintain will become even more crucial to his strategy.

---

an 10 24

'Defending Nazis': Fox host under fire for 'excusing' Trump wanting 'Hitler’s generals' kilmeade

---

===

10 24 badash

A massive new study finds a large number of Republicans, Trump supporters, and conservatives support violence under the guise of saving the country or ensuring the “rightful” leader is put in the White House.

Three in ten Republicans (29%) believe “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” according to the nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization PPRI’s “2024 American Values Survey.”

Nearly one in four MAGA Republicans (23%) “say that if Trump loses the election, he should declare the results invalid and do whatever it takes to assume office.” That view is also held by nearly one on five (19%) Republicans overall, including those who do not support Trump.

MAGA Republicans, or “Republicans who view Trump favorably are three times as likely as those who hold unfavorable views [of Trump] to support political violence (32% vs. 11%).

RELATED: ‘Zero Remorse’: Trump Doesn’t Condemn Gunman Who Allegedly Threatened FEMA Workers

More than one in five Republicans (22%) agree that “if the 2024 presidential election is compromised by voter fraud, everyday Americans will need to ensure the rightful leader takes office, even if it requires taking violent actions.”

The study also looked at the politico-religious component of support for political violence, and found one-third (33%) of “Christian nationalism Adherents and Sympathizers” agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”

Additionally, one-third of Latter-day Saints (33%) and nearly one in three white evangelical Protestants (28%) “agree that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”

Where Americans get their news appears to be a factor in their views on issues including violence and immigration.

“Americans who trust conservative news outlets are the most likely to support political violence (41%), followed by 30% of those who most trust Fox News, 18% of those who do not watch any TV news, and 13% of those who most trust mainstream TV news.”

READ MORE: ‘God, Religion and Teaching of the Commandments’: Eric Trump Says Dad Saved ‘Christmas

Six in ten Republicans (61%) agree that “immigrants entering the country illegally today are poisoning the blood of our country,” PRRI’s survey finds, along with a “majority of Americans who most trust far-right news (70%) or Fox News (65%).”

Similarly, nearly two-thirds of Republicans (65%) support the “Great Replacement Theory,” and agree that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” PRRI also finds that the “vast majority of far-right news (83%) and Fox News viewers (66%) agree with this theory,” as do the majority of Christian nationalism Adherents and Sympathizers (63%) and white evangelical Protestants (62%), as well as half (50%) of Latter-day Saints.

“Nearly eight in ten Republicans (79%) favor putting undocumented immigrants in encampments,” PRRI also found. “The vast majority of Americans who most trust far-right news (91%) or Fox News (82%) favor militarized encampments for undocumented immigrants.”

“White evangelical Protestants (75%) are most likely to favor militarized encampments for undocumented immigrants, followed by the majority of white Catholics (61%), white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (58%), and Latter-day Saints (56%).”

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and these answers … are keeping me up at night,” PRRI president and founder Robert P. Jones told Axios. “It’s all pretty dark and worrisome.”

Axios had reported: “The growing number of Republicans willing to shun democratic norms — and possibly embrace violence — comes as Trump continues to falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen from him and is saying the 2024 election is already rigged.”

“Jones said those supporting the loser of the election doing whatever it takes to assume office are essentially endorsing a coup against the United States.”

Last week, Jones told MSNBC’s Joy Reid (video below), “there are [survey] questions that we have had to write during the Trump era as social scientists that I never thought we would have to write.”

“So to write that question and put it on a public opinion survey and say, we actually need to know what the American people think about this statement, that whether immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country, right, is just, I think we just pause for a minute, to say how astonishing that is.”

He added, “we’re all taught to kind of not be knee-jerk and kind of use the Nazi analogy…but like, ‘poisoning the blood’ — Mein Kampf uses the word blood 150 times,” referring to Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto.

“That’s Hitler’s word, right? And it’s often, it’s almost always used in this way, this kind of idea of purity and defilement, contamination, and it’s a politics of disgust that we’re really seeing here.”

Watch Jones on MSNBC below or at this link.

---

===

mma

Watch Chris Hayes highlight Fox News' deceptive editing in interviews with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump

10/16/24 9:04 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox's Jeanine Pirro says if women were more “educated” about reproductive rights they wouldn’t care about Roe V. Wade

10/16/24 7:41 PM EDT

  1. ### Report: Fox News deceptively edited Trump's town hall

10/16/24

===

mma

There is no Fox “news side.” Wednesday’s Trump and Harris events prove it.

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/17/24

Fox News’ Wednesday programming encapsulated the transformation of the network’s once-vaunted “news side” into an extension of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

In the morning, Fox aired what it had touted as a town hall with Trump featuring an audience of women voters. In reality, the event was functionally a pep rally for the former president, who was guided by Fox anchor Harris Faulkner through questions from a crowd Fox stocked with his supporters. abortion min 58 of 60?]

Vice President Kamala Harris received a starkly different reception that night when she sat down with Fox anchor Bret Baier, at one point catching him using a deceptive clip to downplay Trump’s rants about “the enemy from within.”

Fox’s “news side” has been in steep decline since Trump took over the Republican Party and the network rebranded as his personal propaganda outlet. But even by those standards, the partisan divide it displayed on Wednesday was striking and would be catastrophically embarrassing to Fox’s employees if any of them were still capable of humiliation.

Fox announced last week that it was planning a town hall with Trump that would be taped in Georgia and moderated by Faulkner. The network’s press release stressed that the event would feature an “audience entirely composed of women” and highlighted Faulkner’s journalistic credentials. Politico’s takeaway was that by taking questions from members of “a demographic that has been largely repulsed by his temperament and abortion-rights views,” the former president would be “venturing into more challenging territory.”

In reality, Fox had stocked the audience with Trump’s supporters by inviting local Republican groups, as The Independent’s Eric Garcia reported.

This quickly became apparent when the edited broadcast began airing on the Wednesday edition of Faulkner’s show and Trump entered to a standing ovation from the crowd. The first questioner, who identified herself as “Lisa,” is the president of a local Republican women’s group.

IFrame Content

Over the course of the broadcast, Trump fielded softball questions from people who were clearly voting for him; at least one was wearing branded Trump paraphernalia. He got help along the way from Faulkner, a committed shill for his campaign who has criticized journalists at other outlets for asking tough questions of the former president and avoided pushing back as he spread numerous falsehoods.

Notably, Fox deliberately deceived the public about the audience it hosted for Trump. While Faulkner described the crowd as coming from “every walk of life,” CNN subsequently reported that the network not only stocked the town hall with Trump’s supporters, the version it aired left out two key occurrences that exposed just how in-the-tank for Trump it had been.

A portion of one question “was edited by Fox News to remove her admission that she was voting for Trump,” CNN reported after comparing audio a reporter in the room recorded to the program Fox aired. “During another moment missing from Fox’s broadcast, Trump asked the crowd who they were voting for, leading to a chant of ‘Trump, Trump’ breaking out by the attendees.”

It’s easy to see why Trump might prefer such a supportive environment, even as his campaign reportedly canceled recent interviews with CBS, NBC, and CNBC.

But it is unfathomable that Fox figures would host such an event for Harris — and if they did, Trump would probably threaten that his administration would retaliate against the network.

While Baier has long enjoyed a largely unearned reputation as a credible newsman, he lives in palpable fear of his viewers abandoning his network. He spent the day leading up to his Harris interview telling agitated social media followers that he wasn’t going to give her the questions and the interview wouldn’t be edited to make her look good.

His subsequent performance was what you might expect from someone worried primarily about letting down Fox’s pro-Trump audience. Harris faced a barrage of hostile questions and frequent interruptions when she tried to answer them. Baier devoted the first third of the interview to Trump’s preferred topic of immigration. He spent more time trying to grill Harris on surgeries for incarcerated trans people — a focal point of recent Trump ads — than he did abortion, which did not come up at all.

These tactics made for a combative interview, one that probably would have helped Baier with his audience without hurting his reputation.

But at one point, Baier tried to downplay Trump’s recent fascistic comments about “the enemy from within.” He asked Harris to respond to a clip from Trump’s town hall on the subject — but left out the part where he cited “the Pelosis” as an example of who he was talking about, and added, “These people, they are so sick and they are so evil.” Harris caught him red-handed.

IFrame Content

Baier’s attempted clean-up was blatant enough to draw criticism not only from his competitors at MSNBC and CNN, and from media critics like Poynter’s Tom Jones, but even from former Fox colleagues.

It is unfathomable that Fox personalities would do such a thing in an interview with Trump — and if they did, Trump would probably threaten that his administration would retaliate against the network.

Fox’s “news side” always functioned as a cog in the right-wing media machine that laundered its talking points into the mainstream press, and its claim to independence was demolished during Trump's presidency. But at this point the network seems to have all but given up on even pretending to employ a credible news apparatus.

The last few years have seen newsroom stalwarts with decades at the network leave and call their former employer a propaganda outlet.

Fox’s decision desk was neutered after the 2020 election, with top executives overruling and then firing its leaders.

The network has shortened its “news” hours and replaced newsroom staffers with GOP partisans.

Reporters who tried to tell viewers the truth about Trump’s election fraud claims were first chastised by their bosses and then took jobs at other outlets.

What remains are people like Baier and Faulkner who are comfortable with Fox — the whole network, “news” and “opinion” side alike — operating as an extension of Trump’s will.

mma

recall crm lost it at minor vph edit

Report: Fox News deceptively edited Trump's town hall

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 10/16/24

Fox “straight news” personality Harris Faulkner hosted a town hall with former President Donald Trump. Earlier reports revealed that the audience was stacked with Republicans and Trump supporters. We know as well that Fox News deceptively edited the town hall to obscure the nature of the audience.

Hadas Gold and Liam Reilly report for CNN (emphasis added):

Fox News hosted an all-women town hall with former President Donald Trump, billed as an opportunity for female voters to ask the Republican candidate questions that matter to them.

The Georgia town hall, where Trump took questions on reproductive laws, transgender rights and other issues, aired Wednesday morning. But Fox News did not disclose that the female audience it selected for the event was packed with local Republican supporters and the network edited its broadcast to remove some of their vocal advocacy of Trump.

...

A Fox News spokesperson told CNN the event was not hosted by any Republican group and that it was the network’s event alone. But the right-wing outlet did not disclose the makeup of the audience in its press release announcing the town hall or in Faulkner’s introduction, stating only that it was “held with an audience entirely composed of women.”

The first question posed to Trump at the town hall came from a woman identified as Lisa, who asked the former president a question about the economy. The network did not disclose that Lisa is also the president of the Fulton County Republican Women group.

...

During another moment missing from Fox’s broadcast, Trump asked the crowd who they were voting for, leading to a chant of “Trump, Trump” breaking out by the attendees.

Fox News did not respond to CNN questions about the missing remarks.

The CNN report also notes that multiple people in the audience wore Trump paraphernalia.

mma

How a lie about immigrants and FEMA disaster aid spread across Fox News

Fox’s Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity spread the lie on 5 and 6 straight broadcasts, respectively. Many shows on the network joined in to push similar claims at least once since October 3.

Written by Helena Hind & Alicia Sadowski

Published 10/11/24 mma

Amid the right-wing media onslaught of hurricane-related misinformation, Fox News has latched onto the false claim that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s relief funds for hurricane victims have been drained by aid to undocumented immigrants. In reality, the funding is separate and unrelated.

Top-rated hosts Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity led the charge in repeating the false claim; Watters’ prime-time show repeated the lie in 5 consecutive broadcasts starting October 3, and Hannity managed 6.

Even though a Fox reporter obtained evidence debunking the lie, the narrative spread to the majority of the network’s opinion and “straight news” programs.

FEMA’s disaster relief fund has nothing to do with immigrant aid — and Fox knows it

Watters doubled down the next Monday, October 7: “FEMA’s broke. … Where’d the money go? More than a billion dollars went to welcoming Biden's migrants.” Watters also said that White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre “lied” after she debunked the claim on October 4. Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [10/7/24]

* As Hurricane Milton made landfall on October 9, Watters doubled down again: “Mayorkas said FEMA was going to run out of money for hurricane season. And FEMA admitted they wasted a billion on migrants. Now, I'm not great at math… but if you spend too much money on one thing and don't have enough money for another thing, that means you messed up.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [10/9/24]

* ### Sean Hannity repeated the lie in 6 consecutive broadcasts of his Fox News show

Outnumbered* co-host Kayleigh McEnany falsely claimed that the “reason why” FEMA was facing a budget shortfall was because the agency spent “almost a billion dollars” on “illegal immigrants in migrant shelters.” Emily Compagno reiterated the sentiment by alleging that the “federal government wasted the taxpayer money that these Americans invested” and that Americans were entitled to the money over undocumented immigrants. “FEMA's funds are their funds that they paid into, that they are now being withheld from to pay for illegal migrants,” she complained. Fox News, *Outnumbered*, [10/4/24]

* Laura Ingraham stated that “Democrats are prioritizing the needs of noncitizens … ahead of the people that our leaders are supposed to be serving.” Ingraham called the allocation of money for undocumented immigrant aid “disgraceful” and claimed it resulted in Americans facing inflation and debt to “give gobs of money to liberal special interests.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [10/3/24]

Fox anchor John Roberts}: asked why the federal government did not use the $66 billion FEMA spent “taking care of the illegal immigration problem” to pay for hurricane relief. Fox News, *America Reports*, [10/3/24]|

===

Fox knows it’s lying about immigrants and disaster aid

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/10/24 mma

Fox News hosts and anchors have in hand evidence that their network obtained from a Republican source debunking a falsehood the network has repeatedly promoted about the Hurricane Helene response. They do not care — and are in many cases continuing to push the same lie — because they work for a propaganda outlet whose primary objective is helping former President Donald Trump return to the White House.

Fox chief congressional correspondent Chad Pergram landed a big scoop on Tuesday night, posting to X about how he had “obtained a fact sheet assembled by the majority side of [the] House Appropriations Committee about disaster aid” for Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.

He keyed in on the fact sheet’s statements about aid to immigrants, writing: “It also declares there is ‘no funding connection between’ the migrant shelter program and the Disaster Relief Fund. It adds there is ‘no intermingling of funding between these two programs.’ It adds that ‘the only connection is that both programs are administered by FEMA.’”

This is important because Trump had repeatedly tried to link the programs for his own political gain, claiming that there was no money for hurricane disaster aid because President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had spent it all on helping immigrants — and Fox’s propagandists and the rest of the Trumpist media chimed in. The Biden administration and mainstream news outlets had debunked these lies, but Pergram’s scoop revealed that House Republicans — a source Fox viewers would be more likely to trust — knew they were false.

Fox’s response over the 24 hours after Pergram posted about the fact sheet provides an instructive case study about how the network functions:

  1. On Wednesday morning, Fox News continued to push the falsehood on Fox & Friends, with contributor Miranda Devine claiming that “FEMA was handing out money to illegal migrants instead of keeping it for hurricane victims.”
  1. At around the same time on Fox Business, anchor Maria Bartiromo appeared to reference the House Republican memo Pergram obtained — but only to attack it, asking House Appropriations Committee member Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) whether his colleagues were “lying” (“It’s all FEMA money,” he replied in part).
  1. Pergram did not appear on either network until the lower-rated midday programs — and his packaged report did not address the immigrant funding misinformation that Fox had spread.
  1. On The Five, Jessica Tarlov and Jeanine Pirro sparred inconclusively without mentioning the GOP fact sheet over whether Trump’s claims about disaster aid money going to immigrants was a lie. Jesse Watters ended the discussion by telling Tarlov, “Americans are dying and you're talking about Donald Trump.”

9. That evening on Fox’s flagship “news” show, Special Report anchor Bret Baier did not reference the GOP fact sheet but mentioned in passing that there has been a “back and forth about FEMA money going to immigrants, there is a pot, it’s just different than the disaster pot where the money comes from.”

  1. The network’s high-rated evening Trumpist propagandists all continued to claim money that should have gone to disaster aid went instead to migrants on Wednesday night. Laura Ingraham claimed FEMA money had gone to “sheltering migrants” that “should be spent and allocated to shoring up disaster management for Americans, not on illegal aliens.” Watters claimed that “FEMA admitted they wasted a billion on migrants” and that the agency had been “leaving Americans hanging, but bending over backwards to help foreigners who broke into the country.” And Sean Hannity **said the Biden administration claimed to be running out of funds for disaster aid after FEMA “distributed more than a billion dollars to house and feed Harris and Biden unvetted illegal immigrants.”

A real news outlet would want to get that information out to ensure that its audience knew the facts. But Fox is a Trumpist propaganda outlet, and they acted instead to reinforce the right-wing media bubble that keeps their viewers from the truth.

===

mma 10 24

Fox News senior congressional correspondent Chad Pergram has yet to appear on the network to discuss his big Tuesday night scoop: A fact sheet authored by House Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee which he obtained reveals that Fox and Republicans have been pushing false claims about the federal response to Hurricane Helene.

Pergram posted to X at 9:36 p.m. ET on October 8:

Fox has obtained a fact sheet assembled by the majority side of House Appropriations Committee about disaster aid.

It says that FEMA “has enough funding in the short-term to address immediate needs for both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.”

It also declares there is “no funding connection between” the migrant shelter program and the Disaster Relief Fund. It adds there is “no intermingling of funding between these two programs.” It adds that “the only connection is that both programs are administered by FEMA.”

The fact sheet as Pergram reported it amounts to a damning repudiation of former President Donald Trump’s lies about the federal response. On the campaign trail, Trump has falsely claimed that the Biden administration “stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season,” and that Vice President Kamala Harris spent “all her FEMA money” housing immigrants.

Trump's strategy of grievance-mongering for political gain relies on the impermeable echo chamber created by his propagandists at Pergram’s network and elsewhere. They have spent the last week eagerly peddling the same lies about Democrats looting disaster aid to help immigrants.

“FEMA is running low on funds because they’re blowing it all on illegals,” star host Jesse Watters claimed. According to Laura Ingraham, “Democrats are prioritizing the needs of noncitizens, and now we learn many of them are violent, depraved criminals.”

Pergram’s scoop has not changed the trajectory of Fox’s coverage. On Wednesday morning, Fox contributor Miranda Devine told the hosts of Fox & Friends that “FEMA was handing out money to illegal migrants instead of keeping it for hurricane victims.” Meanwhile, at around the same time on Fox Business, anchor Maria Bartiromo did appear to reference the House Republican memo Pergram obtained — but only to attack it, questioning whether they were “lying.”

But Pergram has not appeared on Fox to discuss his story — which shows House Republicans trying to swat down such claims — as of publication time.

Fox “news side” figures like Pergram give Fox the appearance of a real news operation rather than a corrupt propaganda machine, but in practice the network downplays major stories they break if those stories are bad for Trump or the GOP.

Media Matters will update this post if the network allows Pergram on the air to tell its viewers the truth.

---

mma random

  1. ### Maria Bartiromo on separate funds being used for migrants and FEMA disaster spending: “So what if it's two different funds?”

10/09/24 2:00 PM EDT

  1. ### After citing a House GOP report noting that the FEMA/migrant lie is false, Fox's Maria Bartiromo dishonestly suggests it still could be true

10/09/24 1:46 PM EDT

  1. ### As Hurricane Milton grows, so do conspiracy theories falsely attributing hurricanes to weather manipulation

10/09/24 12:35 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox is totally ignoring Woodward’s report that Trump is in contact with Putin

10/09/24 12:05 PM EDT

  1. ### Fox contributor pushes Hurricane Helene misinformation about migrants after Fox reporter obtained House GOP memo noting it is false

10/09/24 11:54 AM EDT

  1. ### A Fox News reporter said he obtained a GOP memo debunking MAGA hurricane lies. He still hasn't been on Fox to talk about it.

:{10/09/24

---

omg total shameless rubber projection

mma 10 24

October 7, 2024, edition of Fox News' Jesse Watters Primetime

JESSE WATTERS (HOST): What drives them crazy is that they can't control you. And it's why they're trying to silence Donald Trump by any means necessary because his success is an indictment of them, their incompetence, their sedition, their authoritarianism. This election's a battle for survival. It's not just about Trump. It's about the future of the country and whether it will remain free and fair as it was founded.

===

===

mma

October 8, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): Today is Tuesday. It is exactly four weeks before the election, and there's a brand new New York Times poll — came out, an hour and 14 minutes ago. And Kamala Harris has a slim lead. And once again, we've been talking about the polls. They are neck and neck. She's up by three. They were tied in mid-September. It is now 49 to 46.

That is why we're seeing more of her, and we've been talking a little bit about how she's trying to get ahead with the storms and stuff like that. That's one of the reasons why over the weekend, she was out, and the administration was promoting the fact that this administration has sent a hundred and fifty-sevel million dollars to Lebanon. Now that's one thing. But it comes as the same time that there are tens of thousands of Americans struggling, and the federal government doesn't have enough money for them. Peter Doocy asked some very basic questions about how lopsided that is. So let me get this straight. We got money for Lebanon. We don't have money for people in North Carolina. If you miss it, here is this extraordinary interchange.

...

AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): She's missing what he was trying to ask. He was just saying why can we give all this money to Lebanon and without Congress's permission, but yet Congress has to come back to give money to our Americans in North Carolina and in Florida. That's all he was saying, and she's saying you don't want Congress to come back. No.

LAWRENCE JONES (CO-HOST): Ainsley, she knows exactly what he's saying. She being intentionally obtuse, pretending like she doesn't understand there are people, I just got back from there — they are frustrated that they are not getting the resources at a faster rate. I know they say FEMA is there, but the people aren't seeing them. That's the bottom line. People are not seeing them on the ground. They are seeing Samaritan's Purse. The country is a giving country. But when they see other people getting resources before them, they get pretty hot about it. And there's dead bodies still having to be dragged out right now, which is sad. There's no government agency on the ground that's doing, those are private organizations that are doing the work. And so for Peter to ask the question that most Americans that are in this tragedy are feeling, and for her to reject it as disinformation, you don't like the question but it's not disinformation.

BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): We're also watching everyone cover for this administration, The New York Times, the Washington Post, almost every network is not acknowledging the fact that they've taken a week to ask the military to get involved.

JONES: Yes.

KILMEADE: These are hard-to-reach areas, it's different than Florida is going to need. These are hard-to-reach areas. You needed the army, they are literally one hour away and you waited a week. Don't say you didn't need them because you called them last Thursday when you could have had them in country, in the state working on Monday.

CBS News reports (emphasis added):

Only $1.6 billion remains in a federal program to help small businesses impacted by hurricanes and natural disasters — enough funding for only a few more weeks without emergency intervention by Congress. Multiple Biden administration and congressional sources told CBS News there are concerns funding will be depleted by the end of this month.

The remaining pot of funding in the Small Business Administration's disaster loan fund is being severely strained by the damage of Hurricane Helene, CBS News has learned, and the Small Business Administration has received at least 3,000 applications every day since Hurricane Helene struck the Southeast. One administration official said there is not sufficient money to last until Congress' scheduled return to Washington after the November elections.

Congress failed to include additional funding for the disaster fund when it passed a short-term spending bill to fund the federal government in September. Although there is optimism that sufficient money remains to help offset the costs of the Federal Emergency Management Agency until Congress returns during the week of Nov. 12, there are growing concerns that the Small Business Administration disaster money will run dry.

CBS specifically notes that the Republican senator from Florida Rick Scott is among those asking Congress to reconvene immediately:

An aide to Sen. Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, told CBS News that Scott spoke with President Biden about the need for Congress to swiftly reconvene and approve new federal aid to respond to Helene's destruction.

“While I know from my experience with previous hurricanes that FEMA and SBA damage assessments take time, I am today urging Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to immediately reconvene the U.S. Senate when those assessments are completed so that we can pass the clean supplemental disaster funding bill and other disaster relief legislation,” Scott said in a news release.

===

mma

It takes a bubble

Hurricane Helene shows the catastrophic consequences of the right-wing echo chamber's support for Donald Trump's lies

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/08/24

Former President Donald Trump’s deadly lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene — and soon, inevitably, Hurricane Milton — depend on the impermeability of the right-wing information bubble.

President Joe Biden has directed an ongoing federal and state response to the swath of death and destruction Hurricane Helene left on the southeastern United States, an effort which includes tens of thousands of personnel helping victims across several states.

Trump’s Helene response has been characterized by conspiracy theories and grievance-mongering for political gain.

The Biden administration won plaudits from GOP elected officials across the region, but Trump falsely claimed the federal government abandoned the public. Americans affected by the storm can access a robust program of federal assistance, but he falsely claims they could only get $750 in aid. The White House stressed there’s plenty of FEMA funds to respond to both Helene and Milton — and Republicans are reportedly the ones blocking additional funding — but Trump falsely claims Vice President Kamala Harris blew “all her FEMA money” housing immigrants.

The former president, through these deranged fabrications, is trying to win votes in the coming election. He is summoning an alternate reality in which Biden and Harris are blithely unconcerned with the fates of millions of victims because many of those victims are Republicans and they instead prioritize immigrants. And he is doing so despite his own record as president of allegedly withholding disaster aid for political reasons.

The only reason this strategy is remotely plausible is that the right-wing media ecosystem is willing to play along with it. The news sources Republicans rely on, from MAGA influencers to Fox stars, have bolstered Trump’s lies at every turn. The result is that right-wing audiences are bombarded with falsehoods from within an echo chamber.

The MAGA media ecosystem responds in this same fashion to every news event because its function isn’t to report on what is happening. Instead, right-wing pundits offer a scapegoat — immigrants, Jews, journalists, teachers, trans people, Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans — in order to hold their audience’s attention, make money, and support the GOP’s core agenda of tax cuts for rich people and abortion bans.

This incentive structure is universally toxic. But when it collides with issues like disaster relief, the consequences can turn deadly. Before, during, and after a hurricane, people on the ground need credible information about what to do, what help is available, and how to get it. Right now, the sources many victims depend on for news are lying to them.

Hurricane misinformation is plaguing the response to Helene. Local media outlets, federal and state officials, and emergency responders all are desperately trying to swat down rumors and falsehoods — some promoted by the former president. Republican officials in affected areas are begging the people pushing “conspiracy theory junk” to stop lying and pitch in instead.

“The scale of the misinformation — and simply the number of posts and the eyeballs that each of those are being given online, particularly on [X] — that is what is different and truly scary,” a North Carolina state official told Politico. “This has felt like you're in the Thunderdome, and people are just piping this noise in. They create this great confusion. It creates chaos and a crisis moment where you need people to be able to work together and come together.”

The calamity hearkens back to the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Trump and his media allies first downplayed the potential impact of the deadly virus, then promoted unproven and ultimately ineffective medications as a “miracle cure.”

And it bodes ill for the coming election if Trump loses, when all the same figures will have the same incentives to help him deny and subvert the results.

Related

  1. ### Right-wing media lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene

:{10/04/24

  1. ### Right-wing media falsely and dishonestly claim that Hurricane Helene survivors are only entitled to $750 in aid

:{10/04/24

  1. ### Ignoring praise for federal aid from GOP governors and officials on the ground, right-wing media falsely claim that Hurricane Helene is “Kamala’s Katrina”

===

mma

right-wing media falsely and dishonestly claim that Hurricane Helene survivors are only entitled to $750 in aid

According to FEMA, survivors can also qualify for “tens of thousands more dollars” in disaster-related financial assistance

Written by Alicia Sadowski & Isabella Corrao

Published 10/04/24

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, right-wing media falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration are ignoring millions of Americans impacted by intense flooding. Media personalities and MAGA influencers have falsely and dishonestly claimed that victims are only entitled to $750 in aid, when in reality that is just the start of federal benefits.

FEMA can provide assistance for victims of Hurricane Helene, but chronic underfunding and climate change, not undocumented migrants, threaten future aid availability

To wit, on Thursday, Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters aired a clip of Vice President Kamala Harris speaking in hurricane-ravaged Georgia the previous day. As Harris spoke on Ingraham’s show, the Fox News chyron read, “Kamala: Here’s $750 that’ll do the trick.”

…

As X/Twitter super-poster Acyn Torbai noted in the video below, Fox News actually carried Harris’s speech live the previous day. The vice president explained that the $750 is just the beginning of the assistance available to impacted residents. Mediaite, [10/3/24]

* Anti-Muslim activist Brigitte Gabriel claimed that victims of Hurricane Helene would get “$750” but that a “criminal thug from South America” would get “a 4-star hotel with credit cards.” She posted, “If you lost your entire house during Hurricane Helene, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will give you $750. If you are a criminal thug from South America and cross the border illegally through Mexico, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will put you up in a 4-star hotel with credit cards.” Twitter/X, [10/3/24]

===

Fox networks falsely accused striking dockworkers of holding up hurricane relief

10/04/24 mma

===

mma

Right-wing cable news networks have pushed false claims about non-citizens voting relentlessly

In the past three weeks, Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax together have made at least 141 baseless claims pushing falsehoods about noncitizen voting

Written by Harrison Ray

Research contributions from Rob Savillo, Tyler Monroe, Ben Van Bloem & Lis Power

Published 10/04/24

Fox Business, Fox News, and Newsmax have peddled the false conspiracy theory that noncitizens vote en masse at least 141 times since House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) unveiled the text of the SAVE Act messaging bill. Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo and her shows have been some of the biggest propagators of the claims.

Since then, conservative cable news networks’ false claims have included suggesting that Democrats have actively encouraged noncitizens to vote in order to swing election results, stating that there have been thousands of instances of noncitizen voting, and highlighting extremely rare, individual instances of voter impersonation in order to suggest the practice is widespread.

Video

CitationFrom the September 19, 2024, edition of Newsmax's Chris Plante The Right Squad

* Among the top offenders was Newsmax host Rob Schmitt, who had the most claims (10), followed by Newsmax host Chris Salcedo (7), Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) (5), Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) (5), and Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo (4).

===

mma

How Fox is dismissing the unsealed Trump filing

Fox News stars don't want Trump's criminal behavior to be an election issue — because they're running the same scheme again

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/03/24

Fox News stars are running cover for Donald Trump after special counsel Jack Smith provided extensive new revelations about the former president’s scheme to use lies about fraud to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, culminating with a mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol. The network has spent four years supporting Trump’s subversion plot, covering up his attempt to steal that election, and paving the way for him to try again next month.

“With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results,” states Smith’s filing, which the judge overseeing Trump’s federal criminal prosecution for his 2020 election conspiracy unsealed in partially redacted form on Wednesday. “The through line of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud.”

The filing includes previously unreported details about Trump’s activities leading up to and on January 6, 2021. It recounts how Republican leaders, including Vice President Mike Pence, had urged Trump to stop pushing election fraud claims that lacked evidence; that some of the claims appeared entirely fabricated; and Trump’s lack of interest in curtailing the mob he had incited — when an aide told him Pence had been taken to a secure location, the then-president allegedly responded, “So what?”

Some at Fox recognized the gravity of this moment.

“It was in this newly unsealed court paper we're learning that former President Trump resorted to crime in a bid to cling to power after the 2020 election,” Fox anchor Neil Cavuto said shortly after the document became public, apparently paraphrasing Smith's argument.

But Fox’s biggest stars — several of whom cheered on Trump’s election subversion plot but privately recoiled when it culminated in the attack on the Capitol — either presented Smith’s revelations as old news or ignored them altogether.

Fox host Laura Ingraham, a sometime Trump adviser during his presidency, texted then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows amid the insurrection: “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”

But on Wednesday night, she presented the filing as part of a Democratic conspiracy to move the public discussion away from the vice presidential debate between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance.

“Fewer than 24 hours since Vance wiped the floor with Walz, and with Trump closing in on Kamala in the swing states, Democrats needed to change the subject and fast,” Ingraham claimed. “So they hit the rewind button to January 6.”

“Anti-Trump Judge Tanya Chutkan, playing an October surprise act of politics, unsealed Jack Smith's motion as part of his superseding indictment against Trump for the events of January 6,” she added. “Now — because that's relevant to the problems all of you are facing tonight. But heck, 33 days before the election, it's better than having to talk about port strikes and high gas prices.”

She then brought on former Trump acting attorney general Matt Whitaker, who claimed that the unsealing was a “fairly outrageous act by Judge Chutkan, because at the end of the day, you know, she is trying to influence an election” and the filing itself simply provided “the same rehashed story.”

Video

CitationFrom the October 2, 2024, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle.

Fox host Jesse Watters provided a similar take the following hour, telling Trump lawyer Alina Habba, “Jack Smith and this crazy judge in D.C., they're dropping all kinds of legal bombs. It happens to be the day after Walz bombs this debate.” Habba responded that the filing was “desperation,” “a distraction,” and “election interference.”

Fox prime-time host Sean Hannity, who is one of Trump’s closest allies and functioned as an extension of his White House during his presidency, is well aware of the danger posed by Trump’s plot. He privately warned Meadows about how Trump’s planned appearance at a rally of supporters on January 6, 2021, could go wrong, even as he publicly promoted it. After the riot began, he pleaded with Meadows to get Trump to stop it, though he made excuses for the mob on his show that night. The next day, he told then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany that the “key” was “no more crazy people” having access to Trump, and urged an end to “stolen election talk.”

But on Wednesday, he did not cover Smith’s filing at all.

Fox played an indispensable role in setting Trump’s coup plot in motion.

The network spent the months leading up to the 2020 election priming viewers to disbelieve its results. When Trump lost but claimed the vote had been rigged against him, Fox spent weeks promoting election conspiracy theories its hosts and executives knew were false. When the incitement that Fox had aided led to an unprecedented attack on the U.S. Capitol, the network’s stars downplayed what Trump had done and hid the damning truth from its audience.

Trump’s subversion scheme failed — but it didn’t end. He still lies that he won the 2020 election. He replaced Pence with Vance, who refuses to admit that Trump lost that vote. And Trump hints that if he loses, that will mean the election has been stolen — and his supporters will be justified in responding with violence.

Fox, having seen the disastrous consequences of indulging Trump’s election fraud conspiracy theories, is fully in his corner, preparing the way for another coup attempt. The network’s airwaves are once again filled with baseless demagoguery about potential election fraud.

We’ve all seen where this ends.

Fox News' Jonathan Turley downplays Jack Smith’s filing alleging Donald Trump attempted “to overturn the election”

10/02/24 mma

===

mma

Fox News misrepresented ICE data on immigration and crime in over 50 segments

85% of Fox segments about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics included misrepresentations of the data even after multiple Fox personalities attempted to debunk the falsehoods

Written by Rob Savillo

Research contributions from Tyler Monroe & Harrison Ray

Published 10/01/24

Since September 27, when GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) released data on immigration and crime that he requested from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Fox News has misrepresented the meaning of the statistics over and over: In 53 of 62 segments about the data (or 85%), Fox spun the information to promote a number of falsehoods about immigration and crime in the U.S.

Video

Media Matters found at least two instances of Fox News personalities or reporters attempting to debunk the false claims about the ICE statistics that were spread widely on the network: one from The Five co-host Jessica Tarlov and another from Los Angeles-based correspondent Bill Melugin. Both instances occurred the same day the data were released.

Moreover, the Department of Homeland Security subsequently issued a statement to media outlets September 28, which was included in a fact check by CNN the following day, properly contextualizing the numbers from ICE:

The data in this letter is being misinterpreted. The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.

When Fox did include the proper context from DHS or ICE — or even from their own reporters — the network continued to push false narratives about immigration and crime. Fox personalities and guests downplayed, undermined, or dismissed the clarifications in more than half of such segments: 17 segments, or 57%.

* Right-wing media ran with those false characterizations of the data, and they were bolstered by former President Donald Trump's misrepresentations in several social media posts.

Trump posted the false claim that “13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during her [Kamala Harris'] three and a half year period as Border Czar,” followed up with another falsehood, “almost 14,000 MURDERERS to freely and openly roam our Country,” and finally double-downed on both false statements with another post, writing, “14,000 CONVICTED thugs and slimeballs who have committed MURDER have been allowed to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, and roam free.”

Such rhetoric is not only false and misleading; it intentionally stokes unwarranted fears about immigrants and crime, specifically those who have crossed the southern U.S.-Mexico border. The Trump campaign has been using these misrepresentations to unfairly attack Vice President Kamala Harris' record — despite the fact that immigrants in general are more law-abiding than native-born Americans and that studies have consistently shown that undocumented immigrants do not commit more crime than U.S. citizens.

---

aha he is getting rich and pol power by libel, add to lawsuit?

trump is losing? this is extension of gt replacement, illegal voters?

note does not cite fox report

September 27, 2024, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): The Harris-Biden regime, they are stuffing foreigners in the reddest communities across the country, in small town red America, I think partially as revenge. Blake might not agree with this, but I think that they get, like, off on this sinister, like, we're gonna go send the Haitians into red America.

BLAKE NEFF (CO-HOST): Maybe a bit of that. Maybe a bit of that.

KIRK: I think there's an element there. You can't convince me. I have no evidence of that, but it's just gut instinct. I'm not gonna get into what states can do to resist this yet because I wanna win the election and do this properly through the federal government. If we lose in November, it's gonna get very, very messy. I'm just gonna be honest. Like, it's gonna get messy of states being —

NEFF: Especially if they start packing the courts, then you're you really have to start thinking, like, OK. What are we gonna do about, like, this truly out of control wants it all —

KIRK: Do we have a country at this point?

NEFF: Yeah.

KIRK: And I don't wanna get there yet, Emily. But, Emily, just so we're clear, the Haitians that are in Huntsville that are raping your women and hunting you down at night — it's only gonna get worse if — unless Donald Trump wins. A new report from Fox News shows that across the border, 13,000 people convicted of murder, 15,000 people convicted of rape on the non-detained list — meaning they're currently roaming free around our country. So right now, roaming free on the interior of the United States are 13,000 convicted murderers, 15,000 convicted rapists. And they're just — they're having a field day, and they're coming for your daughter next.

...

KIRK: I want you to understand this. That means that they're coming across the border, they run a background check, or someone knows, and then they say, just have fun. That's what that means. That means that they — we know who they are, and then we just release them into the interior and say —

NEFF: It just shocks me, like, the level of control you can have over media narrative that. Like, you know, The New York Times or whoever can blow this off. 13,000 homicide convictions just roaming the US as an elective policy choice.

KIRK: And the election is close. I mean, the election is close. It's very close. And, it — again, there was a poll that just showed up here. Arizona women voters, favor Kamala Harris 52%, 43%. And that does not include the 2 million gotaways. And since those are the border jumpers who avoid border encounters, it's safe to conclude the proportion of convicted criminals is even higher than that 2 million plus of them. Thank you for being a member, and stay safe in Alabama, and pray Trump wins, or else things are gonna get really bad.@@ They're gonna get even worse. There will be hundreds of thousands of Haitians brought into Alabama, and they will become your masters.

---

ggl 9 24

Top stories

Fox News

Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants with sexual assault, murder convictions in US: ICE data

2 days ago

Fox News

White House mum amid outrage over data showing how many illegal immigrant criminals are in US

1 day ago

FOX NEWS ALERT ROBERTS AND BLONDE NANTUCKET GOTAWAYS CHILD RAPE

The White House has yet to comment on new data released to lawmakers showing the number of illegal immigrants with convictions for sex offenses and homicide convictions who are not in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention.

The agency provided data to Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, about illegal immigrants with criminal charges or convictions. The data, as of July 2024, is broken down by those in detention and those who are not in detention, known as the non-detained docket.

The non-detained docket includes noncitizens who have final orders of removal or are going through removal proceedings but are not in ICE custody.

There are more than 7.4 million people on that docket, up from around 3.7 million when former President Trump left office.

**TENS OF THOUSANDS OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS WITH SEXUAL ASSAULT, MURDER CONVICTIONS ROAMING US STREETS: ICE DATA**

U.S. Border Patrol agents at the U.S. and Mexico border fence in Calexico, Calif. ( Eric Thayer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The data shows that, among those not in detention, there are 425,431 convicted criminals and 222,141 with pending criminal charges. The data does not reveal how many of those criminals are recent arrivals.

For comparison, in August 2016, toward the end of the Obama administration, ICE said there were about 2.2 million noncitizens on the non-detained docket and about 368,574 were convicted criminals.

In the latest data, the criminals include 62,231 convicted of assault, 14,301 convicted of burglary, 56,533 with drug convictions and 13,099 convicted of homicide. An additional 2,521 have kidnapping convictions, and 15,811 have sexual assault convictions. There are an additional 1,845 with pending homicide charges, 42,915 with assault charges, 3,266 with burglary charges and 4,250 with assault charges.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the data and whether it had been aware of the numbers. Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign also did not comment. Harris is at the southern border in Arizona.

Fox News Digital has also reached out to the Department of Homeland Security.

The news sparked outrage from Republicans, who tied the numbers to the policies of the Biden administration and those sanctuary jurisdictions who refuse to cooperate with ICE.

**‘POLITICAL STUNT': CRITICS DISMISS HARRIS' EXPECTED ARIZONA BORDER VISIT AS IMMIGRATION REMAINS TOP ISSUE**

Rep, Gonzales called the data "beyond disturbing" and said "it should be a wake-up call for the Biden-Harris administration and cities across the country that hide behind sanctuary policies."

"It’s time for Washington to move past rhetoric and toward results. Americans deserve to feel safe in their communities. As an appropriator, I will do everything in my power to ensure ICE has the resources necessary to deport noncitizens with a criminal record. This must be a priority," Gonzales said in a statement.

"The Biden-Harris administration also plays a part in cleaning up the mess their failed policies have created. They have the ear of sanctuary city mayors. It’s time to encourage them to reverse course and put the safety of American citizens first."

Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green said the release of illegal immigrants into the U.S. "defies all common sense."

Immigrants line up at a remote U.S. Border Patrol processing center after crossing the U.S.-Mexico in Lukeville, Ariz. (John Moore/Getty Images)

"This is madness. It is something no civilized, well-functioning society should tolerate," he said.

In the letter to Gonzales, ICE took aim at so-called "sanctuary" cities that refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement in deporting illegal immigrant criminals.

"ICE recognizes that some jurisdictions are concerned that cooperating with federal immigration officials will erode trust with immigrant communities and make it harder for local law enforcement to serve those populations. However, ‘sanctuary’ policies can end up shielding dangerous criminals, who often victimize those same communities," it said.

It also stressed DHS’s efforts to remove illegal immigrants.

"From mid-May 2023 through the end of July 2024, DHS removed or returned more than 893,600 individuals, including more than 138,300 individuals in family units. The majority of all individuals encountered at the Southwest Border over the past three years have been removed, returned or expelled."

In a statement on Saturday, DHS said the data was being "misinterpreted."

"The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration," a spokesperson said. "It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners."

The administration has said it needs more funding and reforms from Congress to fix a "broken" immigration system, including via a bipartisan Senate bill introduced this year – which has been rejected by Republicans. DHS said that bill would have provided much-needed resources, including additional immigration enforcement agents and officers and additional detention resources.

It has also pointed to a sharp drop in arrivals since President Biden signed an executive order limiting asylum at the border in June. DHS also said it has removed over 180,000 noncitizens with criminal convictions since Jan. 2021.

**CLICK HERE FOR MORE COVERAGE OF THE BORDER SECURITY CRISIS**

The Biden administration has prioritized the removal of public safety and national security threats in narrowed priorities it released in 2021, but critics have linked those priorities with a drop in ICE removals.

Video

Republicans have blamed the border crisis on the policies of the administration, including rolling back Trump policies that limited "catch and release."

Asked about the increase in the non-detained docket this summer, a White House spokesperson pointed to that bill.

"Congressional Republicans had an opportunity to support the fairest and toughest set of reforms in decades, and they chose to put partisan political interests ahead of fixing our immigration system and securing our borders," the spokesperson said.

"Congressional Republicans have proven that they do not care about securing our border because, frankly, if they did, they would have supported the bipartisan agreement."

**CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP**

The data’s release comes as Harris visits the southern border in Arizona and seeks to present herself as tougher on the border than former President Trump, who she blames for the border bill not passing.

"Donald Trump tanked a bill to improve border security — just so he can win this election," she said Friday. "As I have shown throughout my career, I won’t back down from my plan to make our border more secure."

*Fox News' Bill Melugin contributed to this report.

Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital, primarily covering immigration and border security.

10:12

YouTube · Fox News

Over 13K illegal immigrants convicted of murder have been released into US

Video1 day ago

More news

Anyone who defends illegal criminals crossing the border ...

Fox News

https://www.foxnews.com › video

2 days ago — 'The Five' co-hosts break down reports of thousands of criminals crossing the U.S. southern border.

Missing: 13000 ‎convicted ‎murder, ‎15000 ‎rape ‎non- ‎detained ‎list

Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) / X

X · BillMelugin_

468.6K+ followers

by ICE, the agency reveals there are currently 13,000+ noncitizens convicted of homicide ... Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants with sexual assault, homicide ...

Missing: people ‎list

September-2024-Border-Report.pdf

House Committee on Homeland Security (.gov)

https://homeland.house.gov › uploads › 2024/09

PDF

Sep 18, 2024 — news/immigration/colombian-convicted-murder-released-ice/. ... Mayorkas' watch, including those guilty of violent offenses like homicide, sexual ...

Illegal Immigrants

Fox News

https://www.foxnews.com › category › immigration › il...

Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants with sexual assault, murder convictions in US: ICE data ... homicide convictions are currently roaming the United States, ...

Missing: 13000 ‎15000

News

FBI.gov

https://www.fbi.gov › news › RSS

Jun 15, 2023 — ... murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. “We are encouraged by ... Through Operation Not Forgotten and the broader Missing and Murdered ...

The Biden-Harris administration released into the U.S. ...

YouTube · John Lott

3 views · 1 day ago

... convicted of murder and 1845 accused of murder, alongside hundreds of thousands more convicted or facing charges for other crimes, as of recent

Missing: shows ‎across ‎rape ‎list

15000 killers, 20000 sexual assault convicts, 60000 ...

Washington Times

https://www.washingtontimes.com › news › sep › 1500...

2 days ago — 15,000 killers, 20,000 sexual assault convicts ... That included 13,099 people convicted of homicide and 1,845 charged with homicide.

Missing: Fox ‎| Show results with: Fox

"Every State is a Border State: Examining Secretary ...

Congress.gov

https://www.congress.gov › event › house-event › text

Human Rights First has tracked over 13,000 publicly-reported murder ... murders, rapes, and things that are happening in the community. Can you tell ...

===

mma 9 24

Fox News raises false alarm about noncitizen voting

This narrative, which has saturated Fox News, was echoed by Donald Trump on the debate stage

Written by Alicia Sadowski, Isabella Corrao & Jane Lee

Research contributions from Pete Tsipis, Sage Hodil & Casey Wexler

Published 09/16/24

At the September ABC News presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump falsely claimed that there are “illegal immigrants coming” and that “they’re trying to get them to vote” in United States elections. Trump’s “great replacement” racist conspiracy theory echoes a far-right dog whistle blown repeatedly by Fox News hosts, contributors, and guests in recent months.

Even though noncitizen voting is both illegal and rare, Fox News has attempted to instill panic by suggesting that droves of noncitizens are voting as a result of the Biden administration’s immigration policies and political strategy and the legal ability of noncitizens to acquire driver’s licenses.