Welcome back to Media Matters’ weekly newsletter. This week:
Fox News gave no airtime to the Trump administration withholding funds to Democrat-led states.
Major broadcast networks failed to link extreme heat waves this summer to climate change.
Jesse Watterswas instrumental in pushing Trump’s bogus Reflecting Pool vandalism story.
Fox panel celebrates report showing loss of 23,000 jobs: “This is great news.”
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Right-wing moment
This week's infighting
After a college student complained to a Turning Point USA spokesman about the price of burritos, right-wing figures are bickering about affordability and grocery prices. A Fox News guest complained that the college student was pushing a socialist agenda — while even the Fox host admitted that “Let's be honest, the squeeze is real, prices are higher right now.”
Fox anchor John Roberts: “We were told weeks ago that there was a deal to open the Strait of Hormuz, that Iran had agreed to give up its nuclear program. … We’re back to square one again.”
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro is now feuding with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. When she was a Fox News host, however, Pirro endorsed Burgum to be Trump’s 2024 running mate.
Ben Shapiro called Tucker Carlson’s manifesto a “deliberately simplistic, unsophisticated, semantically overloaded bunch of bullshit.”
Laura Loomersaid Fox News is “TV for stupid people.”
New reports show the Trump administration denied disaster requests and cancelled energy grants for blue states — Fox covered neither
Citation
Andrea Austria / Media Matters
Recent reporting from Politico and The New York Times showed that President Donald Trump denied disaster relief requests and terminated funding for clean energy grants in Democrat-led states. As of August 3, Fox News has dedicated no airtime to either story.
Politico reported that Trump denied disaster requests from New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island following a historic blizzard. Additionally, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration admitted to cancelling grants for energy projects to states "’based solely’ on whether they backed President Trump in the 2025 election.”
According to a Media Matters review, Fox News didn’t mention either story between when they were published and August 3.
Excuse me?
Both leading up to and following Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s Democratic primary victory this week, right-wing media launched a tirade of Islamophobic attacks against him. They’ve mainly latched onto El-Sayed’s faith and ethnicity, with figures calling him a “parasite” and a “rat,” and saying he is a “radical advocate for Muslims, including terrorists.”
After another failed scramble to prove Trump’s claims that China interfered in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, White House task force leader and right-wing media personality John Solomon is now attempting to retry a Maricopa County, Arizona, election website hacking case that was investigated, reported on, and closed years ago.
Fox Business celebrated the July jobs report which showed a loss of 23,000 jobs in the country. One guest said, “This is great news.”
Fox’s Sean Hannity said the idea that the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes “just is not true.”
Newsmax’s Michael Savagesaid New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is “absolutely the head of the Muslim Brotherhood here in America, maybe in the whole Western world.”
ABC, CBS, and NBC aired nearly 200 segments about three U.S. heat events without mentioning climate change
Citation
Media Matters / Andrea Austria
From late June through July, successive heat waves swept across large portions of the United States, breaking temperature records and placing more than 100 million people at a time under heat alerts. ABC, CBS, and NBC closely tracked the extreme heat as it moved across the country, repeatedly reporting threatened or broken records and warning viewers about dangerous conditions. What the networks did not explain was why these events kept arriving in rapid succession — climate change.
Media Matters analyzed broadcast news coverage of extreme heat during a four-week period and found they aired a combined 194 segments about the three major heat events that struck large parts of the country during that period. None of the segments mentioned climate change.
This is the continuation of a pattern. In recent years, ABC, NBC and CBS have covered extreme heat events without explaining how human-caused warming makes those events more frequent and severe.
Media Matters’ Evlondo Cooper has this great study if you would like to read more.
Reflecting Fool: How Jesse Watters helped push Trump’s bogus vandalism story
When Fox News host turned U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro dropped a high-profile case and acknowledged the alleged vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool had not occurred, Pirro left her former colleague Jesse Watters out to dry. Watters had repeatedly portrayed the supposed vandals as America-hating leftists bent on destroying the country, devoting several segments to the story in increasingly explicit terms.
Trump has strenuously and repeatedly blamed “Deranged Vandals” for damaging the pool after he ordered its renovation and repainting earlier this year — even as reporting from as early as May pointed to problems with the work of the installer, who received a lucrative no-bid contract. But last Friday, Pirro’s office moved to dismiss charges against the only person to face a felony charge over the damage.
This story presents an important window into how this administration and its propaganda outlets operate — federal prosecutors have tried but often failed to carry out Trump’s demands that his real or imagined foes face legal punishment, and then those political prospects often rely on support from the president’s media allies. In this case, no one in MAGA media had carried more water for the baseless claims about the Reflecting Pool than Watters.
Media Matters’ Matt Gertz provides a great breakdown of this absurd case.
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