Welcome back to Media Matters’ weekly newsletter. This week:
As gas prices go up from the Iran war, Fox News celebrated the “biggest payday in history” for oil companies.
Longtime right-wing media figure and former Trump lawyer Joe diGenova's recent key appointment at the Department of Justice received different reactions on Newsmax and Fox News.
Fox’s Maria Bartiromocelebrated the president’s son’s company winning a Pentagon contract.
Right-wing and MAHA media figures have criticized Trump’s moves backing glyphosate producers, calling it a “betrayal” and “political suicide."
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This week's infighting
Many right-wing and MAHA media figures have expressed shock and disappointment at the Trump administration’s embrace of glyphosate — the active ingredient in the weed-killer Roundup — but some have defended his characterization of the herbicide as essential to national security and the country's food system.
Alex Jones: “Trump signed on to the deep state closing us and is bragging about it."
Podcaster Megyn Kelly on Trump: “Netanyahu played him like a fiddle. He played to his hubris, which is exactly how you’re supposed to manipulate Trump.”
Election deniersare pushing conspiracy theories about “massive fraud” and cheating in Republican-controlled Texas primary and special elections.
As gas prices go up from the Iran war, Fox News celebrated the “biggest payday in history” for oil companies
Fox News is embracing the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz due to President Donald Trump’s war against Iran as an economic boon for U.S. petroleum exports, with host Jesse Watters boasting, “The U.S. oil market is open for business, and it is booming. Big Oil just had its biggest payday in history.” However, the closure of the strait will further increase American gasoline prices. Fox has already tried to downplay the increasing fuel prices that have resulted from the closure — a price spike that’s straining both the U.S. and the global economies, threatening famine, and pushing us toward global recession.
Fox’s embrace of Trump’s disastrous war of choice echoes how the network previously supported the president’s illegal tariffs scheme. When Trump announced his tariffs, Fox provided full-throated backing of the policy and claimed that it would help the U.S. economy. In reality, the tariffs resulted in further job losses for the industries they were intended to support, higher inflation, weaker economic growth, and, ultimately effectively zero revenue due to court-mandated refunds.
Fox doesn’t care about the pain you feel under this president’s economic policies, only in supporting their Dear Leader.
This week in stupid
Newsmax’s Greg Kelly on the threat of measles: “Chillax a little bit."
Fox’s Sean Hannity on negotiations to end the war with Iran: “It’s in America’s, frankly, unique interest if the strait was closed."
Fox’s Brian Kilmeade on Iran negotiations falling apart: “We’re victims of our own success, killing so many leaders.”
Fox’s Larry Kudlowsaid the Iran war “hasn’t hurt our economy.”
A tale of two right-wing networks on Joe diGenova
Citation
Andrea Austria / Media Matters; image via screenshot.
Last weekend, Joe diGenova — a GOP lawyer who represented Donald Trump in his bogus election fraud cases in 2020 and a longtime fixture in right-wing media — was appointed to a role of overseeing a planned investigation into Trump’s political enemies.
The right-wing media reception to diGenova’s appointment has been strangely mixed. While Newsmax hosts celebrated his appointment, their counterparts on Fox News — which apparently banned diGenova from appearing on the network years ago — have mentioned the news just one time, in passing, on Sunday afternoon.
diGenova has regularly appeared on Newsmax in recent years. After he received his new appointment, hosts like Greg Kelly celebrated, saying, “One of our favorite guests on this show will be a counselor to the attorney general.” Fellow host Carl Higbie also touted the news. But while Newsmax’s stars throw a parade over diGenova’s appointment, their Fox counterparts have been largely silent.
Fox is in a strained position, because while the network spent years feverishly demanding and supporting the prosecutions of Trump’s enemies over dubious premises, its leaders are seemingly also aware that diGenova is not credible. In 2018 and 2019, diGenova made more than 100 appearances on Fox News and Fox Business. But both networks appear to have banned him in late 2019. He has not appeared on a Fox News weekday program since October 8, 2019. In February 2020, The Daily Beast reported on an internal Fox News research briefing book detailing the “unrelenting disinformation campaign” in which diGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing, played “notable roles." (You may recall that the same Fox News research credibly cited Media Matters.)
As Matt Gertz concludes:
Now someone Fox’s own research division panned for “spreading disinformation” will be running the Trump administration’s latest efforts to criminalize their opponents. The network has spent years feeding the flames of the conspiracy theories that diGenova will now be investigating — but highlighting his new role might force the network to confront what it means that someone it’s apparently deemed unreliable is leading that charge.
Trump has accused news outlets of deliberately producing fraudulent reporting on at least a dozen occasions in the weeks since the White House Correspondents’ Association invited him to attend its dinner. Trump blames “Anti-America” journalists who he claims are “rooting for Iran to win” for this reporting, and he has repeatedly described their behavior as “almost treasonous.” As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz writes, it’s impossible for the press to celebrate the First Amendment with this president.
Podcaster Benny Johnson on Virginia’s redistricting election: “What that is is 51% of the population stripping away the civil right of representation from 49% of the population. That’s how you get a civil war."
Newsmax’s host Carl Higbie said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) “should be expelled from the Senate and charged with treason."
Fox’s Greg Gutfeldsaid Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is guilty of “treason.”
Fox’s Maria Bartiromo celebrates the president’s son winning a Pentagon contract
Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo — who was one of the most fervent participants in Fox’s efforts to turn Hunter Biden’s business interests into a corruption scandal for his father, former President Joe Biden — congratulated President Donald Trump’s son Eric after his company landed a robotics contract from the Pentagon.
During the Thursday broadcast of her Fox Business show, Bartiromo devoted more than 10 minutes of her program to a fawning joint interview with Foundation Future Industries CEO Sankaet Pathak and Eric Trump, the company’s “chief strategy adviser.” After Bartiromo congratulated the pair on winning a $24 million Defense Department contract to test its “Phantom” robot for military applications, she gave them a platform to talk up their product, as well as what Bartiromo described as “these incredible goals that you’ve got,” including to “build life-sustaining technology on Earth and beyond."
Last week, we explained how Trump’s family has apparently adopted Fox’s “Biden Crime Family” conspiracy theory and turned it into a business plan.
Fox hosts who tore their garments over the Bidens typically just ignore the historic effort of the Trump family to cash in on the president’s second term in office. But Bartiromo is taking it one step further by openly celebrating Eric Trump’s business.
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