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As a Sunday bonus for subscribers, I connected last week with Matt Gertz, Media Matters senior fellow and an old friend of the newsletter, to talk about the state of Fox News as we approach the midterms, including the network’s role in pushing out Katie Zacharia as White House press secretary after a single disastrous press briefing and two equally bad Fox hits.
“Fox News hosts are professional propagandists. Their job is to help Donald Trump escape from his various crises and scandals. And I think they looked at Zacharia as someone who was not capable of covering for Donald Trump when he gets in trouble, someone who wouldn’t be able to lash out at the media for daring to cover him, and they helped her off stage because of that,” Gertz told me.
I also asked Gertz about his piece, “French riots are the new Hunter’s laptop which was the new migrant caravan which was the new Ebola,” and about what lessons he thinks Fox learned from the $787 million Dominion settlement as Trump once again threatens to meddle with American elections.
“The critical error from a legal perspective that Fox News made back in 2020 was that they made some very specific false allegations about a company that they named, and that is the sort of thing that leads to massive defamation lawsuits,” Gertz said. “I am skeptical that they won’t follow if Trump really goes all in with this. They’re in too deep at this point to not support him if he goes for broke.”
A full transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, follows. If you’d like to read it and aren’t already a paid subscriber, please become one. Paid subscribers make this newsletter possible and are the reason everything we publish Monday-Friday remains free for everyone.
Aaron Rupar
Fox News obviously played a role in pushing out White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia, though the nature of it is disputed. Politico initially reported that Zacharia’s brutal Hannity interview was set up by Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, but then they retracted it. In any event, Zacharia’s fate was sealed by an equally disastrous interview she did on Fox & Friends the morning after her Hannity hit. What do you think that episode shows us about the dynamic between the administration and Fox these days?
Matt Gertz
I saw those reports as well, and I don’t know quite how to think about them. It’s weird to position the White House press secretary as needing the chief of staff to weigh in or to reach out to a Fox News host to book someone.
But I watched her segments with Sean Hannity and again with Fox & Friends the following morning, and they’re really fascinating rich texts as interviews. I’ve seen a lot of interviews over the years in which various right-wing figures who are in some sort of hot water go on Fox & Friends or Sean Hannity’s show to get out of trouble. Kristi Noem, when the story about her killing her dog was making a lot of waves, went on Hannity’s show to do damage control.
There’s actually a term that Dave Weigel coined a while back, “Cannonization,” for that sort of interview where the host is basically trying to help you over your troubles. This was not like that at all. Neither of those interviews were. They felt to me rather like the hosts were shocked and saddened by what was going on. It was as if they were very gently attempting to speak to someone who had just been diagnosed with a terminal disease and wasn’t willing to come to grips with that.
