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Matt Gertz: Tucker’s Trump Derangement Syndrome

March 8, 2023
Notes
Transcript

Tucker has been dining out on how much the media supposedly despises Donald Trump — when by his own admission, he hates Trump with a passion. And his take on Jan 6 is inherently contradictory: It was Nancy’s fault, but also not much happened that day. Matt Gertz joins Charlie Sykes today.

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This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:08

    Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. It is March eighth two thousand twenty three. And as I wrote in my newsletter this morning, oh my, the planet of bullshit have aligned marvelously, Heaven Bay. We got these Tucker Carlson texts to another producer at Fox News on January fourth two thousand twenty one, you’ve heard this, I know.
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:28

    We are very, very close, he wrote. To being able to ignore Trump most night, I truly cannot wait. I hate him passionately And wait, there’s more. He also wrote, that’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest, but come on, there isn’t really an up side to Trump.
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:53

    That’s also Tucker, January fourth two thousand twenty one. So we have all of this happening at once, we got another juicy document drop from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News. And then, of course, Tucker Carlson. In partnership with his poodle. Kevin McCarthy continues his attempt to retcon the attack on the capital.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:17

    Let’s start there. Because in case you missed this, on Monday night, he began his campaign of revisionist history, which I will spoiler alert. It’s not going well, but This was Tucker Carlson cherry picking some of the forty thousand hours of video that he got from Kevin McCarthy to say that that insurrection that you all saw with your eyes wasn’t really an
  • Speaker 2
    0:01:44

    insurrection at all. Here he is. A small percentage of them were hooligans. They committed vandalism. You’ve seen their pictures again and begin.
  • Speaker 2
    0:01:52

    But the over welming majority weren’t. They were peaceful. They were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionists. They were sight seers.
  • Speaker 2
    0:02:01

    Footage from inside the Capitol overturns the story you’ve heard about January sixth. Protesters queue up in neat little lines. They give each tours outside the speakers’ office. They take cheerful selfies and they smile. They’re not destroying the capital.
  • Speaker 2
    0:02:16

    They obviously revere the capital.
  • Speaker 1
    0:02:19

    Meek. They were meek. Could just interrupt this for a quick reality check. This was from the January sixth committee audio from that day.
  • Speaker 3
    0:02:29

    We need an area for the house members. They’re all walking over now. Who the titles?
  • Speaker 4
    0:02:41

    We’re trying to have the empathy. We’re trying to have the empathy now. We need to end the close of the conference.
  • Speaker 1
    0:03:08

    What’s interesting is the reaction to this even Republicans, especially Republicans in the Senate, are anxious to distance themselves from what Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson are putting out there. Here’s a little quick montage of Republican senators react staying to what Fox News is trying to do here.
  • Speaker 5
    0:03:30

    I think it’s bullshit. I was here. I was down there. And I saw maybe a few tourists, a few people who got caught up in things, but when you see police barricades breached, when you see police officers assaulted, all of that or you had to be in close proximity to it. I I just don’t think it’s helpful.
  • Speaker 6
    0:03:48

    All I know is that there were, yeah, there were a lot of people in
  • Speaker 7
    0:03:52

    the capital at the time who I think works here for their lives. So that you can, you know, however you wanna describe it, but it was a it was an attack on the capital.
  • Speaker 4
    0:04:01

    I think that breaking through glass, windows, and doors to get into the United States capital against the orders of police is is a crime point is what happened that day shouldn’t have happened.
  • Speaker 8
    0:04:12

    Clearly, the chief of the capital police, in my view, correctly describes what most of us witnessed firsthand on January sixth. So that’s my reaction to it. It was a mistake in my view for her. Box news to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at Capitol.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:46

    Six. So the timing for today’s podcast could not be better. We are joined by Matt Gertz senior fellow at media matters who has been studying Fox News in the right wing outlets in its orbit for fifteen years. So first of all, good morning, Matt. Good morning.
  • Speaker 1
    0:05:06

    You’ve done this for fifteen years and you have not lost your mind yet.
  • Speaker 9
    0:05:09

    Well, I I mean, different people may have different opinions on that, but I I can put up a good front at least.
  • Speaker 1
    0:05:16

    It’s hard to know where to even begin this morning. But let’s start here. You know, it’s one thing to talk about, you know, the fire hose of lies in hypocrisy from Tucker Carlson, but this story is also about Kevin McCarthy. And the role he’s playing in giving up all of these tapes to Carlson and to Fox News. So give me your take on this.
  • Speaker 1
    0:05:38

    What’s going on here? I mean, as you wrote, I mean, if McCarthy actually thought, you know, turning over forty thousand hours of security footage was, you know, all about transparency. He might have given them to the press and public. So why did he give them to Tucker Carlson? And what does that say about Kevin McCarthy?
  • Speaker 1
    0:05:55

    What he gave them to Tucker Carlson
  • Speaker 9
    0:05:56

    because he knows that Tucker Carlson produces propaganda. He knows in particular that Tucker Carlson has been spending the last couple of years, spinning up this alternate narrative about January sixth. He says that the standard narrative that we all saw with our own eyes that day was a holy created myth and that in fact The real story of January sixth is that there were some old people from unfashionable zip codes who wallched into capital and they wandered through it, and they were basically having a tour — Mhmm. — and that after the fact, the media Democrats jumped on it in order to basically create political prisoners out of these poor victims. And that you at home, the viewer, are next.
  • Speaker 9
    0:06:51

    This is not like some sort of secret. This is not a hidden message in in Carlson’s Bulwark. You know, he did this big multi park series called Patriot purge. And after that, you saw a couple of fox personalities. Leave the network about January sixth.
  • Speaker 9
    0:07:11

    Steve Hayes and Junicle twenty twenty one. Steve Hayes, Junicle Burger guest. Chris Wallace left later that same year, and so this was a big to do. McCarthy knows what Tucker Carlson would do with this footage. She gave it to him for that reason to produce this propaganda.
  • Speaker 9
    0:07:30

    And now, you know, you played those Republican senators criticizing Carlson McCarthy thinks all of this is fine. He is quite happy with how things are going. He wouldn’t have done it any other way, because Carlson did exactly what he expected him to do. So you also point out though that this gift of footage was part of Tucker’s
  • Speaker 1
    0:07:49

    demands when McCarthy was trying to lock down the votes to become speaker. Right? I mean, back on January third, Tucker was ripping Makar. He said he shouldn’t be allowed to become speaker until he agreed to release all the footage from January sixth. And among the the many surrenders in cabins that Kevin McCarthy, you know, performed at that time.
  • Speaker 1
    0:08:08

    That was one of them. Right? I mean, sort of an indication of who holds the whip hand and, you know, who’s who’s bitch?
  • Speaker 9
    0:08:15

    Absolutely. Walt McCarthy was trying to find the votes that he needed to become speaker. Most of Fox was basically rallying behind him Ron DeSantis saying, these Republicans who are standing this way should just get on board, but Carlson was different. Carlson said that McCarthy should make a deal with the Republicans who are unwilling to support him, specifically he wanted all of the footage from January sixth released to reveal the lies that he claimed had been told about that day and he wanted the house to have a committee on the weaponization of the federal government that he claimed had occurred over the last several years. He got both of them and in fact got special personal access for his team to the footage drove as part of the
  • Speaker 1
    0:09:07

    deal? So you said before that Mckenna McCarthy is, you know, perfectly happy with all of this. Are you sure about that? Because clearly he I mean, I won’t say reluctantly, but I mean, this wasn’t his idea. I mean, he looks silly at the moment.
  • Speaker 1
    0:09:21

    Doesn’t it? I mean, e you even have Mitch McConnell standing up there holding the letter from the chief of the capital police saying, you know, what a what a complete go rope this all is and saying that no Fox made a terrible mistake. So why is he happy? Doesn’t understand that hugging January six so closely is perhaps not on message and also provides an opportunity for us to remember all the things that he said back then in contrast to to the the game he’s playing right now. Yes.
  • Speaker 1
    0:09:51

    Even though he looks like a fricking Hippogriff? Or are these people just sociopaths? I
  • Speaker 9
    0:09:55

    mean, I just they’re they’re not care. I think he looks like a fool and a Hippogriff to people like us who remember the comments that he made about January sixth in the immediate aftermath and who recognized what actually happened that day. But I I don’t think rational actors are who he’s playing to. He’s playing to the Republican base that the people that Tucker Carlson holds in the palm of his hand and he wants their support, wants them on board, wants them to stop criticizing him. You know, Carlson has had a lot of nice things to say about Kevin McCarthy — Yeah.
  • Speaker 9
    0:10:31

    — in the wake of being granted access to this footage. Getting Carlson off his back may
  • Speaker 1
    0:10:36

    be worth you know, it’s worth it. Yeah. I think that’s the right calculation. I wanted to just drill down a little bit on this. Why is this happening?
  • Speaker 1
    0:10:45

    And I have several different layers to this question. Why is Fox News doing this? Now when they are faced with a billion dollar plus lawsuit for their lies about the election. The week after, we had this incredible embarrassment of riches from the document dumped from showing the the text messages and the emails, the the hypocrisy, the duplicity, the the dishonest
  • Speaker 10
    0:11:11

    state. Why is Tucker Carlson doubling down on this. And why has Fox News letting him? So I think that these two things are not really inconsistent. If you look at
  • Speaker 9
    0:11:23

    these text messages, what they reveal is that people like Tucker Carlson are willing to spread things that they personally believe are untrue. Yeah. Because they know that that is what their viewers want to hear. What I think is the key text message from all of these dumps is Tucker Carlson, telling Laura Ingram, that he personally found the lies from Sydney Powell and Rudy Giuliani unbelievably offensive. But, quote, our viewers are good people and they believe it.
  • Speaker 9
    0:11:57

    I think that is the key that unlocks Tucker Carlson’s show and a lot of the rest of Fox News. They are not in the business of informing their viewers. They are not in the business of teaching their viewers. They are in the business of telling their viewers what they believe is correct. And what Tucker Carlson’s viewers believe is correct in part because they’re inclined to believe this in the first place, in part because Tucker keeps telling them that is that the January sixth attempted coup and insurrection was no big deal and that if anything, it is an attempt to attack them personal.
  • Speaker 9
    0:12:39

    And so that is what he is serving up to them.
  • Speaker 1
    0:12:42

    Well, I mean, obviously, though, that they are faced with some legal peril, and there are people in Fox News who are very, very concerned about this. I mean, there are the the Murdoch. What do you make of the fact that Brett Bayer aired a segment yesterday in which he, you know, called into question Tucker’s reporting and actually aired the Republican senators, you know, saying what terrible mistake. Is I mean, is there kind of an operation cover your ass going on now in at Fox? Is there a division about this?
  • Speaker 1
    0:13:07

    How is this playing out internally? So there’s always been, I think, a bit of a divide
  • Speaker 9
    0:13:12

    at Fox News between the news side and the opinion side on how to handle stories like this. You can see in coverage from Red Bear of January six, the good amount of pushing particular Republican narratives about whether Nancy Pelosi did a good enough job of ensuring security and so on and so forth, but they really do not typically go to this sent of diving into the fever swab.
  • Speaker 1
    0:13:45

    Back to this question of why is this happening? Now, why does Tucker Carlson feel the need to whitewash and to Retcon January six. What is the motivation here you would think is that Republicans Ron DeSantis, you know, even Trump is would want them talk about something else. So why does Tucker Carlson think that is so important in March of twenty twenty three? To go back and relive and re litigate January six.
  • Speaker 1
    0:14:13

    Does he feel that it’s necessary to do this in order to rehabilitate Donald Trump? Is it about discrediting Democrats? What is the reason why he is so focused on this particular issue at this time as opposed to moving on.
  • Speaker 9
    0:14:28

    I think it’s about setting himself up as the true defender of right wing people like the people who watch him on TV. He is establishing that he is willing to defend the patriots who have been subject to political persecution and that he is going to do so while Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell are willing to abandon them. I don’t really think it’s about rehabilitating Trump, though that is, in fact, what it does. Right? I mean, one of the major strikes against Donald Trump is he tried to subvert the election and institute a coup, and it led to the storming of the US capital by his supporters.
  • Speaker 9
    0:15:14

    That is a bad thing. Some people think that’s bad. Right? Some
  • Speaker 1
    0:15:17

    people think that might be an issue. Yeah. You won’t
  • Speaker 9
    0:15:20

    hear that from Donald Trump, certainly. You won’t hear that from any other serious candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in twenty twenty four. That entire debate has been stamped out by people like Carlson telling their viewers night after night that there’s nothing to see here. Howard
  • Speaker 1
    0:15:40

    Bauchner:
  • Speaker 7
    0:15:43

    Alright,
  • Speaker 1
    0:15:43

    let’s talk about these document dumps. All of the things that we’ve been seeing, I’m I’m guessing you have had no sleep over the last week, just reading all the text messages and everything. But you’ve been writing about uncovering Fox News for fifteen years So I’m really interested to get your perspective. What have we learned in the last week that we didn’t know before? Or what has it confirmed?
  • Speaker 1
    0:16:04

    What is new to you? What did you go? Shit. You know? I I never thought I’d read this.
  • Speaker 1
    0:16:10

    And anything or does this confirm everything you thought?
  • Speaker 9
    0:16:13

    I think it is remarkable to see things that sound perfectly normal, coming from a media veteran’s senior fellow. Coming from Rupert Murdoch. It’s quite typical for me to look at Fox’s coverage and say, oh, this is Republican propaganda. They’re trying to get particular Senate candidates elected to office. It’s horribly unethical and corrupt, and not something that normal news outlets do, but that’s clearly what’s happening.
  • Speaker 9
    0:16:41

    There. Yeah. It’s very different to look at an email from Rupert Murdoch in which he tells Fox News CEO, Suzanne Scott, we should concentrate on Georgia helping any way we can with regard to the runoff elections that were happening in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one.
  • Speaker 7
    0:17:00

    Did you
  • Speaker 1
    0:17:00

    run around the office or run around the house saying, they put it in fucking writing? I cannot believe it. Look, it’s right here. It’s right here in black and white,
  • Speaker 9
    0:17:07

    but that is very much what was happening as I was reading these emails. The other one that just knocked me down similarly. This is Rupert Murdoch. Again, this is Anne Scott. We cannot lose the senate if at all possible.
  • Speaker 9
    0:17:21

    Like, we really, you you wrote that down in an email.
  • Speaker 1
    0:17:27

    I did not see that coming. There are so many dazzling details that get lost in all this because they’re just so much, you know, including the fact that Rupert Murdoch was giving, you know, valuable internal data and information and tips to Jared Kushner about the debates, about the Biden campaigns, advice, that’s this pretty remarkable stuff, Matt. I think, just objectively speaking.
  • Speaker 9
    0:17:48

    I think that’s correct. And, you know, media matters has filed a complaint with the SEC to look into those particular details because it sure seems like Rupert Murdoch was giving internal information that he knew about because of his job at Fox News to the Trump campaign in order to help that campaign get elected, and that would be illegal corporate spending. There’s quite a lot here the incidental details, you know, stuff like the Fox prime time hosts clearly despising their new side colleagues, and at times trying to get them fired for telling the truth is remarkable as well problematic. A little bit. Yeah.
  • Speaker 9
    0:18:29

    But I I need the broad contours. I would say are things that I’ve been saying for the last decade plus that Fox News is willing to lie to its viewers on a grand scale in order to make money in a mass power that they deliberately act to sway particular elections, knowingly, that they are a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party rather than a legitimate news outlet. Now there’s just so much more evidence coming from people inside Fox News to back it up.
  • Speaker 1
    0:19:02

    So what is the greater existential threat? If there is an existential threat, what is the greater threat to Fox News right now? This lawsuit, the one point six billion dollar lawsuit, and maybe more to come, or the loss of their audience if they’re not perceived to be sufficiently Trump mug friendly. I mean, that kind of caught between a rock and a hard place though. Which is the greater threat to them?
  • Speaker 1
    0:19:26

    Because they’re obsessed about both of them.
  • Speaker 9
    0:19:28

    I think the the Armenian lawsuit is actually providing a lot of risk that other right wing outlets that want to snag some of Box’s market share are likely to take advantage of. You mentioned the newest filing, which features Tucker Carlson talking about how much he hates Donald Trump. That is a remarkable document given his own show over the last several years. Certainly, Tucker Carlson’s audience members do not expect him to be someone with what appears to be a fairly advanced case of Trump derangement syndrome. Will they though?
  • Speaker 9
    0:20:04

    If someone like NewsMax or OAN, that has been a tactic that the other Fox competitors have taken repeatedly over the last several years. He was what Fox executives were so terrified about in November of twenty twenty that they saw that NewsMax was snagging their market share and they were doing so in part by openly attacking Fox News with a laugh from Donald Trump. And I think we’re seeing some of the same things come to pass with these Dominion filings. Trump lashing out at Robert Murdoch and others of Fox on his truth social platform, and some of the competitors from dabbling into covering that story.
  • Speaker 1
    0:20:49

    So let’s talk about this text that you mentioned that we let off with Tucker Carlson saying that We are very very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately. And there’ve been a series of this. This is not just a one off where he talks about, you know, what a menace he is and and everything.
  • Speaker 1
    0:21:10

    So I know it’s dangerous to try to get into the mind of Tucker Carlson, but some of these hosts, including Tucker, obviously, despise Trump, hate Trump, fear Trump, and yet continue to chill for him.
  • Speaker 9
    0:21:24

    Here is a quote that my colleague, Eric Hennanoke, found last night after after reading that email. Reporters hate Trump with an all consuming mania, they hate him so intensely that at times it’s been amusing to watch. That’s Tekra Carlson October thirtieth twenty twenty.
  • Speaker 4
    0:21:44

    Mhmm.
  • Speaker 9
    0:21:45

    So he and his entire network have been dining out for years on how much the media despises — Yeah. — Donald Trump and propping Donald Trump up as a hero for standing against the fake news media and they themselves, in the case of Tucker Carlson, hate Donald Trump by their own admission. It’s fascinating stuff. And
  • Speaker 1
    0:22:13

    also, you know, you wrote about this in a piece for MSNBC that it ultimately doesn’t matter what the Fox Stars believe it matters what they say, and these text messages show the Tucker Cross and the other hosts deceive their own viewers because they think that’s what the viewers want. And that’s the kind of the subtext here is they they really despise they have contempt for their own viewers. And feel that the the viewers want to be lied to and can be lied to and that they won’t pay a price for us. So let me ask you this though. You know, I asked before what is the greatest existential threat, the lawsuit or the loss of of viewership?
  • Speaker 1
    0:22:48

    Or is there no existent filth. Is Fox gonna simply barrel through this? You know, listening to Tucker Carlson? I’m thinking I’m looking at a guy who thinks there are going to be no concert sequences for this. That he’s gonna come out the other side just fine because they have in the past that the audience will swallow this as it has swallowed so many other things in the past.
  • Speaker 1
    0:23:08

    What do you think? I think
  • Speaker 9
    0:23:09

    it depends on if the audience ever finds out about it at all. Yeah. I mean, the audience for Tucker Carlson show is not reading The New York Times, The Washington Post. They’re not getting information about this from CNN or Secret Podcast, they are firmly ensconced, but can they rightly be a bubble that is effectively seamless and subject to the members of that Redwing media having told them for decades that they cannot trust mainstream news outlets. So the key thing is whether there aren’t enough cracks in that right wing media information bubble, whether there are enough critics who feel like they can snag some market share from Fox by trumpeting this stuff to really let them know what’s happening here that I think is the real question.
  • Speaker 9
    0:24:07

    I don’t know the answer to it. I think we’re seeing some movement on that front so far, some coverage from outlets like NewsMax. I think there was a national review piece. There’s a little bit.
  • Speaker 1
    0:24:20

    Trump himself, Steve Bannon, was bring it away in front of me. Steve Bannon is just on a complete g hard against against the Murdoch’s and Fox News right now. That’s right. And he
  • Speaker 9
    0:24:29

    has a lot of influence with a big chunk of that Fox News audience. So I I think we have to see how that develops before we’ll know for sure.
  • Speaker 1
    0:24:42

    I’m looking at some of your coverage because you’ve been going through this in great detail and you’re right looking at what Tucker is putting out. Honestly, while the purpose is obviously grotesque, because the Tucker Carlson shows actual output here has been pretty pathetic. And then you have a, you know, his gloss on what the footage showed his team had weeks with forty one thousand hours of security tape and it is kind of lame what they came up with. It is in many ways very underwhelming to think that with forty one thousand hours, you just come up with a couple of these cherry pick scenes. And that’s why he’s I think he’s been widely mocked by, you know, fact
  • Speaker 10
    0:25:22

    checkers and and other non magnified viewers as well. Just talk to me about that a little bit. How underwhelming it is. So the most important thing about these performances is
  • Speaker 9
    0:25:32

    the conclusion. Right? And the conclusion has been set up in advance. No one, I think, certainly not Kevin McCarthy, imagined that Tucker Carlson was going to gain access to all this footage and come out of it and say, oh, man, you know, I was really wrong this really was an interaction. There there really was a lot of violence and and police officers getting assaulted and it’s it’s a disaster.
  • Speaker 9
    0:25:58

    I I now I need to apologize to my viewers for misleading them. That that was never in the cards. He was always going to conclude huge cover up. January sixth was was no big deal really that the the democrats and the media are out to get you. That was all going to happen no matter what.
  • Speaker 9
    0:26:15

    But, yeah, I’ve been really surprised at at how pathetic the actual output has been here. I mean, they had a couple of weeks with forty thousand hours of tape and what they come up with is like, okay, there are scenes like the ones you’ve previously seen of people who have breached the capital and are walking through it without breaking anything. I mean, okay. It kind of seems like he’s demanding the answer from missus Lincoln, you know. Other than that, how is the play?
  • Speaker 9
    0:26:47

    Why won’t missus Lincoln health. Yeah. Exactly. Whether the play was good. I mean, the the sort of key facts here are all of the law enforcement officers getting assaulted and congress going into hiding rather than carrying out their constitutional duty to count electoral votes.
  • Speaker 9
    0:27:06

    That was kind of the big deal here. But, you know, Tucker Carlson doesn’t wanna talk about that, so he’s talking about how, you know, one particular officer was not beaten to death because you can see him walking around — Mhmm. — afterward, Stickney, and and we’re not gonna mention that he was also sprayed in the face with pepper spray, and that he died the next day of a stroke that the medical examiner said was related to what had happened. We’re just gonna pretend that what our video shows here. And
  • Speaker 1
    0:27:36

    his family has put out a scathing statement on all of that. It is interesting though that Tucker in some ways has become a parody of one of the rights favorite media memes from twenty twenty. Remember the the CNN reporter who standing in Kenosha, Wisconsin, you know, talking about the fiery but mostly peaceful protests with this big fire behind him. You know? Yeah.
  • Speaker 1
    0:27:56

    Nothing to see here. Tucking Carlson, mostly peaceful. Okay. So you also have written about night two of of Carlson’s propaganda campaign. And there’s a little bit of cognitive dissonance going on.
  • Speaker 1
    0:28:07

    Right? That he’s arguing at the same time. You know, this was just a crowd of sightseers, meekly walking around the capital, while simultaneously trying to argue that the capital police were shamefully unprepared for that day. So which is it? Right.
  • Speaker 1
    0:28:21

    Which is it? We were shamefully unprepared for this terrible thing happening, which didn’t happen because here’s all my images of these sightseeing tourists, meekly walking through the capital.
  • Speaker 9
    0:28:31

    Yeah. It really doesn’t make any sense at all. You know, there have always been two lines of critique around January sixth from the right. You have some people trying to make it a story about Nancy Pelosi saying Nancy Pelosi should have ensured that the capital was better defended that day that there was more capital police ready for these protesters. But that argument only works if you accept that there was actually a lot of violence on January sixth.
  • Speaker 9
    0:29:03

    If you don’t do that, if you use the second argument, which is, this has all been overblown. There wasn’t really that much violence. It was probably Fed aggregators who started it whenever there was. Those two arguments do not match up, but he’s he’s trying to do both. So night one is all about how there was very little violence.
  • Speaker 9
    0:29:25

    There was some vandalism by a small minority of the people that were there that day. At night two, is him claiming that the capital police was unprepared showing video of someone who was involved in defense that day saying that they hadn’t been ready for what happened. But he can’t say what the consequence his word. He says, they had to deal with the crowd milling around the Capitol Building. I guess we dodged a bullet on January sixth that that crowd had been more violent.
  • Speaker 9
    0:30:00

    A lot of law enforcement could have been assaulted, and we might have had a whole year break down of American democracy. But luckily, they were mostly just meek and, you know, nonviolent and and milling around, and so everything was fine, I guess.
  • Speaker 1
    0:30:16

    The NPR did a very interesting piece about the the internal strife at Fox hitting crisis levels after the twenty twenty election. Sort of a pitting the primetime host against the news side and, you know, Laura Ingram saying we are officially working for an organization that hates us. Reporters said they were being punished simply for doing their jobs. One producer told colleagues he was quitting busy, couldn’t justify working for Fox anymore. You commented though that you thought that they prime timers, the Laura Ingrams have the stronger side of the argument here.
  • Speaker 1
    0:30:47

    What do you mean?
  • Speaker 9
    0:30:48

    I mean that they have a correct analysis of what Fox News is and what it is therefore. It is a propaganda machine. It takes in money and power because it lies to its viewers, and they recognize that. And the new side people who think that it is something other than that are really diluting themselves. They are COGS in this propaganda machine.
  • Speaker 9
    0:31:13

    They are there because Fox needs to have some shows that look vaguely like a normal news product in order to attract advertisers because advertisers don’t want to be associated. They pure propaganda channel. They’re window dressing. And I I think the Fox hosts understand that. And the new side people who think otherwise should be examined some of their life choices.
  • Speaker 9
    0:31:42

    Debbie, the place where I think the Fox Prime timers have it wrong, is they think that they are indispensable. What comes across in these text messages is instead saying, we we have a lot of power here. We should use it. And to some extent, I I think they have. I I think the news side has definitely lost a bunch of ground since the election.
  • Speaker 9
    0:32:04

    But the Fox lineup even in primetime is not indispensable. It is placeable. Bill O’Reilly was the king of cable news for the decade plus, and now he has a podcast and a show on something that’s called the first to which I I don’t really know what that is and no one else does either. Mhmm. He does not have a personal law audience.
  • Speaker 9
    0:32:27

    He had an audience by virtue of the fact that he had the eight PM show on Fox News. If Fox got rid of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and Lauren Ingram and replaced them with Pete Tagseth and Dan Bongino and Maria Bartorobo, they would be fucked. The audience would still be there as long as those hosts were still putting out the radical red meat that they have come to expect from Fox News. But they’re all cops. They’re replaceable.
  • Speaker 9
    0:32:59

    They are not indispensable.
  • Speaker 1
    0:33:01

    So let’s talk about Brett Bear on the news side. He had a very bad week last week with the the revelation of those emails suggesting that that he thought the Fox’s call that Biden had won Arizona was wrong, and we should put it back in Trump’s column. There’s a little bit of pushback to people who are defending him. There’s been a release of the full email. So where are we at on Brett Bear?
  • Speaker 1
    0:33:23

    How much are Brett Bear’s journalistic cred has survived, do you think?
  • Speaker 9
    0:33:28

    I mean, I I hope that Brett Barrett doesn’t really have that much journalistic cred at this point at all, but The email is is not good. So this is Thursday, November fifth twenty twenty. Fox News has called state of Arizona for Joe Biden is the first network off the blocks for that, and they are taking a ton of push back from their viewers over this because obviously it is bad for Donald Trump if Arizona goes for Joe Biden. And the email, you know, parts of this came out in the Peter Baker book last September. Ron DeSantis of it came out again in the filing last week.
  • Speaker 9
    0:34:10

    And now we have the full email and and it looks just terrible for Red Bear. The email, it’s to Bill Salmon, the longtime Washington bureau chief. And Chris Starwald, who was at the time, the politics editor and was involved. And both of them were deeply involved in the call, and Jay Wallace, as president of Fox News. And the email is, I know you guys are feeling the pressure, but the situation is getting uncomfortable, really uncomfortable.
  • Speaker 9
    0:34:42

    I keep having to defend this on air and ask questions about it, and it seems we are hoping on for pride. I know the confidence you say you had in the numbers, but it’s at least within the realm of possible that he, meaning Trump, closes the gap now and it’s hurting us, The sooner we pull it, even if it gives us major egg, egg on our face, and we put it back in his column, the better we are in my opinion. And he’s passing on an email from a viewer who is criticizing the Arizona call.
  • Speaker 1
    0:35:14

    I’m not defending Barrett. Let me just push back on what his defenders will say. So he passes on that viewer from an email who said so in the last vote ads, the the latest votes that are coming in in Arizona last night, Trump got fifty nine percent. The campaign is saying they will get sixty percent of the outstanding ballot yet to be counted. And if they only get fifty seven percent, of these outstanding ballots.
  • Speaker 1
    0:35:37

    They will win Arizona. So he’s saying the sixty thousand plus votes that came in overnight are trending very heavily for Trump. Maybe you guys got it wrong. So could you make the case that Brett Bear is actually looking at the data and expressing concerned that maybe they have gotten it wrong. And, you know, it turned out that Arizona was relatively close.
  • Speaker 1
    0:36:00

    So Was he actually doing due diligence, or was he just trying to suck up to viewer sentiment? How do you read this?
  • Speaker 9
    0:36:08

    I mean, I I don’t think you can read the sooner we pull it, even if it gives us major egg and put it back in his column, the better we are, as really anything other than him saying, we’re getting a lot of criticism. And so we should respond to that criticism by reversing our call and putting it back in Trump’s column, you know, he never let in the state. That
  • Speaker 1
    0:36:34

    seems
  • Speaker 9
    0:36:34

    pretty bad. The other part of this though is when it first came out that this had happened. Fox released a statement from Red Bear about this, and he claimed in the statement that in the full email, which was not released in the book, he noted that I fully supported our decision Ron DeSantis call and would defend it on air.
  • Speaker 1
    0:36:58

    I
  • Speaker 9
    0:36:58

    don’t see anything in that email about supporting the call, and he’s not saying he’s defending anything. He says, I keep on having to defend this on air. He’s complaining about it and trying to make it into to something else. That I think is not good for mister Bear.
  • Speaker 1
    0:37:16

    I’ve spent a lot of time talking to and and about Paul Ryan about his role on the board of the Fox Corporation. And and, you know, he was he’s willing to say that he disagrees with with soccer cross. But I think he’s absolutely convinced that he’s more effective being in the room One of the things we learned, I think, from that Dominion document dump was how active he was in emailing back and forth with top executives who clearly had Rupert Murdoch’s ear, a lack of Murdoch’s ear. He thinks that he can influence it And yet in retrospect, here we are sitting here March eighth, and Fox News is continuing to dispute conspiracy theories and lies about the election. They are continuing to put out disinformation on the vaccine.
  • Speaker 1
    0:38:02

    So what is your take on Ryan? It’s interesting that Donald Trump down in Mar a Lago keeps throwing bombs saying that it’s all because of Paul Ryan. The Paul Ryan is pulling the strings. It seems pretty obvious to me that Paul Ryan is not pulling this strings and that the strings he’s pulling aren’t necessarily attached to anything. What do you think?
  • Speaker 9
    0:38:21

    Yeah. I mean, I think he seems pretty confident in his in these documents that he doesn’t really seem to have too much influence over the network and seems to have a bit of a misconception about, again, what what its role is, which is stirring up the base and lying to them and and so creating voters for the Republican Party. But I mean, you know, I think I can do more to influence it from the inside is the same thing that every person at Fox who catches a large paycheck from Rupert Murdoch in spite of the fact that they believe that Fox’s lineup tells a lot of lies is doing. I mean, that’s what Brett Bear is doing. That’s what Chip Smith was doing and Chris Wallace were doing before they finally decided that they had seen too much.
  • Speaker 9
    0:39:08

    Someone like Chuck Smith would when asked about Fox News and why he was still there would say, well, you know, if if I leave what’s gonna replace me, it’s gonna be worse.
  • Speaker 1
    0:39:18

    He’s not wrong. He
  • Speaker 9
    0:39:20

    was not he was not wrong about that. Because, you know, the people that are willing to stay are always going to have a higher tolerance for the crazy than the people that leave. But it is very much a justification for why you stick around and collect the large paycheck. Well,
  • Speaker 1
    0:39:39

    it was also the the justification for sticking around during the the Trump years and not speaking out about what was going on then. So in passing, we’ve mentioned Fox’s vaccine coverage. You have written that in fact Fox’s vaccine coverage has gotten worse. That in the recent analysis, seventy eight percent of the Bulwark vaccine segments between January first and February 25th of this year undermined vaccines. So all of these things continue.
  • Speaker 1
    0:40:06

    Tucker Carlson continues to push the great replacement theory. You continue to have those those kinds of memes. You continue to have the election lines. And they’re going on with vaccine denialism in
  • Speaker 10
    0:40:17

    a pretty big way. So tell me how bad that has gotten or continues to be. In my fifteen years of doing this, there has been nothing that has made me
  • Speaker 9
    0:40:27

    more desperate, I think. Than watching Fox News turn against the COVID-nineteen vaccines. It’s been really depressing to see on such a grand scale. I mean, we’re talking about vaccines that are effectively miracles that dramatically reduce the danger posed by COVID-nineteen that make it much less likely that people who have been vaccinated will have worse cases, be hospitalized, be killed by the virus. Rupert Murdoch was one of the first people in the world.
  • Speaker 9
    0:41:04

    To get vaccinated against COVID nineteen. All the way back in December of twenty twenty, he got the shot and praised it afterwards and said that other people should get it too. And as I said, there’s this right wing bubble, that Fox is such a major part of that has convinced its viewers that all media outlets outside of that bubble camp trusted. I think that gives Fox a unique moral responsibility in a public health crisis and around vaccination to tried to keep their viewers from dying, and they just haven’t seen it that way. Since even before the vaccines were available, Tucker Carlson started attacking them.
  • Speaker 9
    0:41:49

    And the attacks got worse spread throughout the network and have remained. I mean, we’ve been following Fox’s anti backstance since, you know, the vaccine was released. And we do these big studies to try to nail down to a greater extent the contours of this coverage. And so we looked at six weeks in the summer of twenty twenty one, we found that fifty nine percent of Fox’s vaccine segments undermine vaccination. And now, you know, we looked at eight weeks from the beginning of this year, it’s seventy eight percent undermined.
  • Speaker 9
    0:42:26

    Seventy eight percent. Yeah. If you watch a segment of add backs scenes on Fox News right now, it’s going to tell you that vaccines are bad in some way. And it
  • Speaker 1
    0:42:35

    might tell you that they’re going to kill you. And this was not inevitable. Was it? I mean, you could have imagined an alternative reality in which, you know, the the vaccines were the greatest triumph of the Trump administration. I’m not saying this, but I mean, you could you know, Trump could have said, you know, it it’s it was my operation, Warp Speed, that brought the vaccines.
  • Speaker 1
    0:42:53

    I should get credit for the vaccines instead. They decided to turn anti vaccine. And, of course, now Trump is obviously not going to tout his role in developing the vaccine. So or was this inevitable? Is this like baked into it?
  • Speaker 1
    0:43:08

    Or is this a choice by frogs. I think it’s
  • Speaker 9
    0:43:11

    a choice. I think it did not have to be this way. I think you could have had a scenario where Rupert Murdoch’s initial wine that the vaccines are good and I have personally taken them became, you know, the mantra of the whole network. You could have had Steve Docee getting his shot and live on Fox and Brett. You could have had the Fox primetime hosts rallying behind the vaccine because it’s in the interests of their viewers who are overwhelmingly older and in the most danger from COVID-nineteen, but they didn’t care.
  • Speaker 9
    0:43:46

    It’s more important apparently to give the viewers what they wanna hear, you know, confirm the stuff that they’re seeing on Facebook about how dangerous the vaccines are then to try to give them information that can literally save their lives. So, no, it didn’t have to be this way. It was a it was a choice then
  • Speaker 1
    0:44:06

    Matt Gurtz is a senior fellow at media matters, and Matt should not be confused with the Florida congressman, Matt Gates. That doesn’t happen anymore,
  • Speaker 9
    0:44:15

    man. Not as much as it used to, though. Mainly, it’s now it’s Republicans who think that I I’m in, which is a whole different story. I
  • Speaker 1
    0:44:23

    always love your Twitter thread when you would, you know, when Matt Gates would be in the news and you would go, okay, there go my mentions. I’m not that guy. G e r t z of all the people in the world to be confused with. Do not confuse folks. Do not confuse Matthew Gertz with Matt Gates.
  • Speaker 1
    0:44:43

    Matthew Gertz is senior fellow at media matters who’s been studying Fox News and right wing news outlets. For fifteen years. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.
  • Speaker 10
    0:44:53

    Thank you for having me. And thank
  • Speaker 1
    0:44:54

    you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We’ll be back tomorrow. We’ll do this all over again. The polar podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.
  • Speaker 11
    0:45:21

    We’re all juggling life, a career, and trying to build a little bit of wealth. The brown ambition podcast with host, Mandy, and Tiffany, thebudget minister can help. Randy and I are the same age. So she came out, she really popularized natural hair via braids until all of us had braids. It’s written into dress codes and like schools and even some workplaces where braids, locks, are not considered appropriate and needs to be like written into the law.
  • Speaker 11
    0:45:44

    You cannot discriminate against us for hair, brown ambition, wherever you listen.
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