Welcome back to Media Matters’ weekly newsletter. This week:
Fox is using climate change denial to undermine bipartisan support for AI safeguards.
Election denier Tina Petersreportedly met with Trump to discuss election plans. Here’s what that could mean for the midterms.
Some major news organizations failed to mention Fed research showing Trump’s tariffs were responsible for prices of goods increasing rather than decreasing.
After 30 years, Fox has completely dropped even the pretense of impartiality.
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This week's infighting
Fox News political analyst Karl Rove has not appeared on his network’s weekday programming for the last three weeks, an absence that coincides with his newsmaking public statements warning about extremism in the Republican Party and his denunciation by President Donald Trump.
MAGA “prophet” Julie Green said Vice President JD Vance is “the great white wolf” who is “there to stop our president from doing the will of Almighty God.”
Podcaster Candace Owensresponded to Trump importing Argentinian beef, saying, “We’re waking up too fast, and they got to just get parasites in our stomach as fast as possible.”
Fox News at 30: Even the pretense of impartiality is all but gone
Citation
Molly Butler / Media Matters
Fox News’ role as a Republican propaganda machine is clear to anyone who has bothered to peruse its programming — Donald Trump knows it, Fox co-founder Rupert Murdoch knows it, disgraced network co-founder Roger Ailes knew it, and longtime viewers certainly know it. The last holdouts arguing otherwise at this late date are some combination of ignorant, naive, on the Fox payroll, lying to the public, or lying to themselves.
Fox executives have tried for decades to draw a distinction between “hard news” and “opinion” at the network, but that fig leaf has been ripped to shreds since the dawn of the age of Trump, as the network effectively merged with the president's political operation and administration.
Whether it is the revolving door between Trump’s orbit and his propaganda outlet (more than two dozen former Foxers have joined Trump’s administration) or the fact that Fox’s increasingly propagandistic tenor over the last decades has sent a number of network veterans scrambling for the exits to denounce the place they once worked, it’s clear to anyone paying attention that Fox is just state TV for the Trump administration.
Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote this great piece detailing Fox’s status as a pitiful mouthpiece for the Trump White House.
Excuse me?
On October 6, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that if not for Trump's tariffs, goods prices would have declined. In an initial sweep, we found that many major news outlets hadn't yet covered it.
During her prior role as a Fox News host, U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberley Guilfoyle endorsed the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton for her purported role in “racketeering” and “corruption” because Clinton was supposedly “willing to sell access” through a “pay-for-play” scheme. Guilfoyle is now under fire for reportedly soliciting a $100,000 payoff.
Megyn Kellyattacked the Cornell sexual assault case’s Jane Doe, saying, “I’m just going to be honest, she’s not the most attractive gal. She’s extremely beefy in her arms and her legs.” Even some of her callers were disgusted by her remarks, with one caller saying, “I had to turn her show off today, I couldn't even listen to another word of it. And that's how I feel, and I think she's going to lose viewers over this.”
Donald Trump keeps demanding that journalists face arrest and prosecution for reporting that displeases him, and his purported standards for criminal sanctions are developing in bizarre ways over the course of his second term, including attacking outlets that report “empty seats” at his rallies.
Fox is using climate denial to undermine bipartisan support for AI safeguards
In September, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from the company, issuing a stark warning that increasingly powerful AI systems could threaten human survival. Other industry insiders are calling for stronger safeguards and increased government involvement in AI. But over on Fox News and Fox Business, hosts and guests dismissed these warnings and concerns as the next manufactured panic from people they claimed were already proven wrong about global warming.
In addition to portraying climate change as a political hoax that has run its course (with AI now supposedly taking its place), both Fox networks have characterized calls for safeguards as an election-year scare tactic, a pretext for government control, and a threat to innovation. While Fox is running cover for the AI industry, polling shows broad support for oversight among Republicans as well as Democrats.
Fox has already cast local opposition to data centers as a threat to American competitiveness, with many network personalities crediting foreign influence for the backlash, even as resistance has spread through Republican communities and divided conservative media. By associating AI warnings with climate change “alarmism,” Fox draws on the distrust it spent years cultivating in order to now discredit calls for limits on an industry it has championed.
Tina Peters reportedly met with Trump to discuss election plans. Here’s what that could mean for the midterms.
Former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peters, who was released from prison on June 1 after being sentenced to nearly nine years for actions related to tampering with voting machines following the 2020 election, reportedly met with Donald Trump on October 5 to discuss the midterm elections.
Peters has claimed to regularly be in contact with Trump administration officials, and in late August she claimed to have been in the White House six times. She has also thanked White House staff for facilitating her release from prison.
Peters has been vocal in far-right circles about her election plans, which involve arguing that the president has the power to intervene in the midterms through executive power. Peters’ position on federal intervention into the midterm elections is not isolated to just her. This week two guests on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast called for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to intervene in state election systems on the grounds that voting machines are not secure.
Meanwhile, right-wing media figures and election deniers have been encouraging the idea of confiscating ballots and voting machines ahead of the upcoming midterms, as election officials across the country are preparing for “federal law enforcement seizing ballots in the middle of an active election” under the guide of investigating supposed election fraud.
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