Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
That’s a big problem for a network that has the word “news” in its title, yet also can’t keep its audience if it tells the truth about Trump. So Fox has taken to largely ignoring a lot of these very big bad stories. And this has us wondering what’ll happen to the whole institutional superstructure that’s arisen around our homegrown MAGA fascist movement if Trump soon passes from the scene.
Matt Gertz: Good to be back.
Gertz: So I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking and writing about the stories that Fox News talks about, their particular obsessions, their tendency to puff up Donald Trump, their attacks on all of his enemies. But what I’ve been spending more time on lately is thinking about what I call the “negative space”—the stories that do not exist on Fox News, but are of a great deal of interest to people not only who don’t listen to Fox News, but who might be of interest if Fox were to level with their audience about what’s happening in the world. There’s been a series of these, in particular since the summer began, where there’s been an obvious interest in providing coverage, if this were in fact a news network, but Fox has been unable.
Gertz: Sure. Iran is a really clear case of this. Fox to a large extent helped get the country into this war in the first place. There was a great deal of very enthusiastic coverage from people like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin back in February, urging the president to go to war with Iran. There’s been reporting from behind the scenes that he was actually talking about some of these segments in the White House. We saw him use those segments on his social media platforms, trying to drive attention to them. I’ve talked for years about this feedback loop between Fox and Trump, and I think this was its most consequential test.
We tracked mentions of Iran on five of the most popular Fox News shows, the evening programs that the president watches that are so influential on the Republican Party. And we found that mentions of Iran fell 78 percent from June to August. They were down to, like, two mentions per episode, more or less. And this is just a huge decline across all the programs at the same time. They were suddenly no longer talking about an ongoing war that is currently sending the price of gasoline and diesel skyrocketing.
And then all of a sudden, when the thing starts going south for Trump in exactly the way that everybody said it would, they suddenly go quiet? Like, what does he think when he sees that? Does he notice it?
Sargent: On these other stories, you’re finding the same thing, correct? So on this racist candidate that everybody’s been talking about—
Sargent: This is—OK, you do that.
The problem is that there are brown people attending the University of Texas. And he feels that it is necessary to say this. Even in Texas, this is not acceptable.
This is a message that is important for the Fox News audience to hear, right? Like, there is a fight within the Republican Party about what it means to be a conservative. It is now being articulated by someone who not only has sterling credentials in Republican politics, but who has worked for Fox News for 18 years now as their, like, top political analyst. He wrote this in The Wall Street Journal, which is another publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, like Fox News. And this got covered on CNN, it got covered on MS Now. It was not mentioned, this Karl Rove column, on Fox News, where he works. And in fact, Bo French has not been mentioned this entire week. It is the sort of story that is just not part of their discussion, because they don’t have a way to frame this to make it actually about how Democrats are bad.
Gertz: Yeah. I mean, I think Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding being partially paid for by a Russian oligarch is a story that they’re not talking about at all. I think in general, the rise in gas prices and diesel prices in particular—they spent one minute covering the rise in diesel prices over a recent seven-day period. You know, there is no interest from people at the network in covering some of these various health crises that have popped up, the measles, the cyclospora situation. These just kind of recede into the background at Fox.
Matt, I think that a lot of Dems and liberals aren’t really aware that the Fox poll is actually a very good survey. And for them to find this means they’re probably right. Your thoughts on all that?
And so I think what we end up seeing is a very interesting dance that breaks out on Fox News when one of these polls hits. They try to find some numbers that they can talk about while not annoying or sending Trump into a full rage. And so, you know, the coverage that kind of happens over the day, I think, really illustrates this concept of negative space.
Sargent: Yes. And Matt, you mean on the network, right?
Instead, much of the coverage is around how people are responding to the Trump economy. And these are also bad numbers, obviously, for the Trump administration. But those they can finesse a little bit more, largely by doing the thing that is always a good sign that you know that you’re losing, which is arguing with the public about what they should feel.
Sargent: Well, Republican pollster Daron Shaw, who does the Fox poll with a Democrat, said this: “Time is running out for the administration and its supporters to convince voters that things are improving.” So I guess he agrees with you.
Matt, that’s got to be really, really hard for Fox figures to process. Their entire existence is devoted to kind of running propaganda about Democrats. Can you talk about that role that they play, and how they process something like this, which shows that voters are just looking at the Democratic Party and seeing mainstream Democrats, not crazy socialists? What’s going on there?
Now, an interesting number that came out in this Fox poll, and one that they’ve been talking about quite a bit today, is that they asked respondents, does the way capitalism works in the U.S. give people like you a fair shot? And the numbers were yes, 39 percent, no, 57 percent.
Gertz: It is. And they’ve been trying to grapple with this over the course of the day. And what I keep seeing people say is, like, the public doesn’t understand, and what they think is capitalism that is bad is actually socialism that is bad—that it is the government spending that has caused the inflation. They’re saying that capitalism isn’t responsible for the affordability problem, that it’s socialism that’s responsible. And if you don’t like what’s happening, it’s because you’re against socialism, not capitalism. Again, this is an arguing with the public that I think suggests that they just do not have a way to grasp how unpopular Donald Trump has become, and how unpopular the Republican Party and everything that touches him has become.
Bret Hume: Fully 63 percent say it’s made it worse, and that is 11 percentage points higher than the number of people who thought that last year. That is not a number that the president can be very content with. And if you look at what people are saying about what is a major problem for their family—62 percent said grocery prices, 61 percent said gasoline prices. Those are both things that are up. This business with prices is just killing this administration and the president’s party.
Gertz: Well, Brit Hume is someone who has been with the network for decades and decades. He was the host of Special Report before Bret Baier took it over. He’s been their sort of senior correspondent ever since Baier became the anchor of that program. And so he has more leeway than basically anyone else does at the network to say whatever he wants. He doesn’t have his own show, so he doesn’t have ratings of his own to worry about.
Sargent: I think you can see in all this a little glimpse of the future. I think if Dems win this election decisively, we’re not really prepared for just how shrunken and shriveled and brought low a figure Trump is going to start to look like. I also think Trump might see a lot of the institutional support from MAGA, even in places like Fox, start to move away from him pretty decisively.
Gertz: I think it’s a scramble. I think it’s going to be a huge mess over there, between people who want to move on from Trump, people who are Trump loyalists who refuse to. I think we’re going to see a split between people who are supportive of JD Vance, between people who want Marco Rubio to be the Republican nominee. We’re seeing that now on Fox and Friends in particular, where they really do not like JD Vance and really do like Rubio, and clearly want him to create a real primary. And so how all that shakes out, I don’t know. It’s going to be messy. But I think who ends up on top is really hard to predict.
Gertz: Always a pleasure.
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