Juliet Jeske on Fox News brain
"They enjoy sitting in their homes and being angry at the world."
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A note from Aaron: One of the challenges of running a newsletter that publishes four times a week is you always have to be thinking a step ahead. I plan days in advance for every edition of PN. But sometimes my plans are disrupted by breaking news, which can cause me to push more evergreen topics indefinitely into the future.
Such was the case with the below Q&A I did with Fox News expert Juliet Jeske. I talked to Juliet last month and initially planned to publish our conversation while I was traveling in Italy, but I ended up pushing it back … and back … and back again. And now here we are.
To be clear, it’s a quality, compelling interview. Juliet and I discuss everything from how Fox is still subtly pushing the big lie to her unique approach to covering Trump rallies. It just ended up on skates as I devoted editions of the newsletter to covering the Trump trial, major SCOTUS hearings, Biden’s rule-making blitz, Alito going full insurrectionist, and much more.
So with America observing the Memorial Day holiday today and the news cycle taking a bit of a breather, I figured now is a good time to publish my chat with Juliet. I hope you enjoy it and have a pleasant holiday. We’ll be back to regular programming on Wednesday.
Are you terrified of migrants squatting in your home or randomly punching you in the face while you walk down the street? Maybe you find yourself thinking a lot about Hunter Biden or gas prices and how they were lower four years ago? Then, dear reader, you probably have Fox News brain.
Juliet Jeske, author of the highly recommended Decoding Fox News newsletter, is one of the world’s foremost experts on that condition.
“Propaganda is a very difficult thing to erase from somebody's brain,” she told me. “Some people just want to be in that Fox News rage spiral. They’re riding a rollercoaster of fear, paranoia, and hate. And people enjoy that. They enjoy sitting in their homes and being angry at the world. I don't understand that mentality at all. But that's what Fox provides them.”
With Fox circling the wagons around Trump yet again and preparing to do everything they can to help the orange ratings bonanza return to power, I figured now is a good time to check in with Jeske about what she’s seeing.
“They’ve been doing this weird dance where they won't say the words ‘Dominion’ or ‘Smartmatic,’ but they’ll say things like, ‘Well, if the Democrats use these mail-in ballots again, it’ll be bad,’” Jeske said. “Hosts make vague statements about mail voting. Jesse Waters has made comments like that, other hosts have too — they’ve just gotten less specific about it.”
“I would say that based on the comments I get online, most Fox viewers probably still think the 2020 election was stolen, but a lot of them don't know anything about the Dominion lawsuit and they don't care because Fox never talks about it,” she added.
A full transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length, follows.
Aaron Rupar