Media Matters Fellow Matthew Gertz Reveals Fox Study

0:00When you do a deep dive of the backgrounds of the state regime media known as Fox host like Laura Ingraham, you find some commonalities there. We spoke to Laura Ingraham's brother, and here's what he had to say, Curtis Ingraham had to say about growing up with his sister Laura Ingraham. It explains a lot. Let's play it. So my father was a Nazi sympathizer. There was a copy of Mein Kampf on the living room bookshelf. He was abusive. He was an alcoholic. So we are in a family of anger. That's from Laura Ingraham's brother right there. And now when you see her behavior these days, and it's been over the course of a decade at this point, the state regime, North Korea style behavior, it's accelerating.

0:47It's getting worse, if you could even believe that. So now they're at the stage where we don't care that Donald Trump's polling is now in like the 30s. Screw it. Just whatever. He's having fun. Kim Jong-un's having fun. He's posting photos of himself dressed as the pope. This is fun, right? Are we having fun? And it doesn't matter if he's destroying your lives here. Play this clip of her right here saying he's happy. Happy Trump. Play it. I'm going to say this again. I said it last night, but happy Trump is best Trump. And he's having a great time. He doesn't care about these stupid polls. He's fighting stupid polls.

1:22He's having a great time. He's doing deals with the Qataris, doing Trump resorts. They're fun. The Abu Dhabi fund is using crypto. Are you not having fun? This is fun, everybody. Then she like goes back and she's like, you know, the Democrats are doing what they always do. I want you to think about like Watergate and I want you to think about the January 6th hoax. That's what she calls it. And now they're trying to do it again with Trump right now in 2025. Here, let's play this one. You know, I was thinking about this. I've been in Washington a long time. This is all a sad repeat of what Republicans have been dealing with since around 1987.

2:01Yeah, I worked in the Reagan administration in 1987. From the Bork hearings to Iran-Contra to the Russian collusion to the myriad anti-Trump hoaxes, Charlottesville, January 6th. It's one long slash and burn campaign. Democrats didn't really care about any of the underlying issues involving any of those stories. They cared about gaining a political advantage. The heck is she even talking about? You know, Charlottesville, January 6th, the way she says it. Let's bring in Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters. You do deep studies on propaganda media, what's taking place. You call it out. You expose it.

2:43I was fascinated by, and we cover Fox here every day, and you do every minute. And so I was really interested in the study that you all did at Media Matters, where you focused on how basically all of the Trump regime cabinet people are like essentially 24-7 on Fox, the revolving door that's taking place. Talk to us first about your findings, then let's talk more broadly about the implication there, Matt. Sure. So our latest report on this, we looked at all the people in the Trump administration and how they are a constant presence on Fox News and its sister network, Fox Business. We tracked over the first hundred days of the Trump administration, something like 536 appearances of high ranking Trump administration officials on those networks.

3:41Basically, what's happening is the Trump administration and Fox News are effectively, they've merged. They're effectively the same thing. It's very difficult to tell where the administration ends and the network picks up. You've had a whole host of people that Trump hired from Fox News. We've counted 22 individuals who have Fox on their resumes who have ended up in the administration. That includes cabinet officials. The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, got promoted from being Fox and Friends' weekend host. Now he is in charge of the U.S. military. um trump has always had a fixation with fox news uh he watches a huge amount of it uh really hours of it every day according to a lot of reporting uh and so the people that he takes advice from both inside and outside office now uh are uh people who made their uh names uh throwing bombs on Fox News, attacking the left, complaining about various things that have annoyed them and annoy people on the right.

4:56That's the main job qualification to be an advisor to Donald Trump at this point. That's why we call it here state regime media, because there's this merger. Now, this template, we see it like that exists in other authoritarian countries like in Russia, their state regime media. The people are the oligarchs who are also like the hosts on the show and they speak to Putin. Putin tells them what to put on and then they program around what the regime says. I mean, we see this in North Korea, but y 'all have been covering media for a long time. In America, this is very different and it's very alarming.

5:44And talk about the implications of having essentially a cosplay cabinet that goes and plays dress up and they show up in their different outfits and they're not like rolling up their sleeves and doing the work. They're too busy putting costumes on. Yeah, I think that's a good way to think about it. I I mean, when you look at someone like Pam Bondi, who is currently in charge of the Justice Department, you know, she spent, you know, she made two dozen appearances on different Fox News shows over the course of the first hundred days of the Trump administration. One day in four, she's going on Fox News to talk about whatever she says the Justice Department is doing.

6:27That just doesn't really add up. That's wildly disproportionate to what we've seen under previous administrations. And that's because the Trump administration doesn't view itself as attempting to carry out public policy to benefit the people of the United States. They see themselves as propagandists who are trying to spin what Trump is doing to the Fox clientele, to the Trump base who are tuning into Fox every day to get their news. They're trying to keep that base intact because they know that if that base cracks, they're in a huge amount of trouble. As it is, they've seen the polls steadily decline over the first three months of the administration.

7:13I would expect that to continue. But if that core base, if the Fox News audience starts to leave Trump, it becomes a huge problem for the broader Republican Party. And that is what the Trump cabinet seems to be focused on. You know, I'll show you this other clip right here of Laura Ingraham. And this is just an example of kind of carrying out, you know, the Trump policy where she goes and she looks at the migrants are speaking to the camera of people who the Trump regime is disappearing to concentration camps in El Salvador. And she's like, you better self deport. I'm telling you what to do now.

7:58See, you got to follow what I'm saying. And then the Trump regime puts in what hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising on Fox in English to then kind of repeat the message to self-deport. Like that's where our taxpayer dollars go. No wonder Doge has done nothing to actually lower federal spending and federal spending is up. But here's an example of her than carrying out policy here at Play This Clue. But now the Trump team has a message to all those here who should not be. You better self-deport now and not return, or you could be on the next flight to El Salvador. Just that sentence, being the bad guy.

8:42I gave a speech about this earlier this week at the Milken Institute where I'm like, just pull back for a second. What the hell are we talking about here? What am I listening to here? Self-deport or you'll end up in a concentration camp in El Salvador without due process. And Matt, I think one of the dangers here, I think corporate news by and large presents debates that really aren't debates. Should there be due process, you have someone on the left and someone on the right, and then they argue, should there be due process? As I say, I'm not debating somebody. There should be due process. to shut up.

9:18That's it. I'm not having a conversation. But on Fox, they're spreading to their audience and they've got a lot of viewers that due process isn't even a thing. And that this whole way of thinking of authoritarianism is normal. What do we do to fight it? What are you doing to combat it at Media Matters? Because you're both descriptive at Media Matters. You identify the problems, but then you try to fight the problems. And I won't get into all the other stuff. But that's why y 'all are frequently under attack by Trump and people very close to it, because you identify it and you solve the problem.

9:55So tell us, what are you doing to solve it? How we fight back? Yeah, I mean, what we do at Media Matters is we watch all these people so that everyone else doesn't have to, right? We spend a great deal of time not only focused on Fox News, but in the deepest, darkest parts of the internet, the streaming universe, and so on and so forth. And what that means is we have a more granular understanding of where these attacks are coming from and where they're going. We can tell well before it becomes a national story that something like critical race theory is going to break through. What I think we need is more people to sort of pick up that ammunition and run with it because we certainly, you know, it doesn't help to be right all the time if no one else is paying attention to the message and passing it along to the rest of the public.

10:54I think you're right that, you know, the mainstream press can be a little too feckless about this stuff. They are worried about the prospect of Donald Trump trying to destroy their businesses and their business models. We need independent media to step up and let the public know what's going on when mainstream press can't do it. To your point, and I'll just give our audience an example before we wrap up. You know, the Republicans held a hearing this past week on United States fencing. And they were obsessed about they brought in like the president of USA fencing, who, by the way, doesn't get any federal funding.

11:32but if you followed your reports and other people who were showing what was going on on Fox, Fox spent all of this time talking about a transgender fencing person and that that was like their big issue. So the whole hearing was based around this Fox fencing story and the witness gets up here and they ask, so do you get federal funding? Like, why are we even here? And they're like, no, we don't get federal funding. And that's because it originates on Fox. They give the target points. Anything else you think we're missing, Matt, while we got you on here? Anything you're focused on that worries you that you think is not getting enough attention while we have you here in front of this huge audience?

12:13You know, I always want more attention on the Medicaid cuts that the Republicans are brewing up. It's unclear exactly how they're going to try to take health care away from millions of people, but they're going to try to do it. They need to find money from somewhere so they can pass their big tax cuts for the richest Americans. And the well that they always come back to is people's health care. It's an atrocity, and it doesn't get, I think, nearly enough coverage. Matt, we've got to have you on more. I love the work that you guys are doing out there. And we're on our way to 5 million subscribers here.

12:50So for real, when you have your big research studies, whether it's you or your team members, come back and let's get that data out to this. I know you all have a big audience too, but here on YouTube, it's a big audience. People love data here, and I know you're coming with facts, data, receipts all the time. So thanks, Matt. Thank you. All right, everybody, hit subscribe. Let's get to 5 million subscribers. Can't get enough Midas? Check out the Midas Plus sub stack for ad-free articles, reports, podcasts, daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski and more. Sign up for free now at MidasPlus.com.