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Fox News Hosts Scapegoat NATO For Trump's Botching Of Iran War

Fox News Hosts Scapegoat NATO For Trump's Botching Of Iran War

Fox News’ MAGA stars, unable to acknowledge that the war in Iran that President Donald Trump launched with their support is spiralling into a strategic defeat, have landed on a scapegoat: NATO and its member states, which were not consulted by the United States before it joined Israel in starting the war and have since refused participation.

Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, and Sean Hannity respectively denounced NATO on Wednesday as “kind of a meaningless ally” that “we’ve had it with” for purportedly “abandoning us.” Hannity and Ingraham each suggested that Trump should withdraw the U.S. from the alliance (which he is barred from doing unilaterally under a bill Secretary of State Marco Rubio cosponsored in the Senate that became law in 2023).

Trump has spent the last several weeks raging over the refusal by U.S. allies to send their navies into the active war zone to escort oil tankers and other commercial ships after Iran, in an obvious strategic countermeasure to the U.S. attack, closed the Strait of Hormuz. Over the weekend, Spain, Italy, and France refused to allow their military bases or airspace to be used by U.S. or Israeli aircraft involved in the war, triggering a new wave of vitriol from the president and his top aides.

Trump claimed in a Wednesday interview to be “beyond reconsideration” of the U.S. role in NATO after “they weren’t there for us” in Iran. (NATO is a defensive alliance — in response to the 9/11 attacks, its members deployed forces alongside the U.S. military in Afghanistan but are not bound by the treaty to participate in offensive wars.) In an address from the White House that night, the president urged the “countries of the world” to “build up some delayed courage. … Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves.”

The looming strategic failure of the U.S. war in Iran — its regime is intact and in control of its uranium stockpile and the strait, and altering those circumstances that would likely require a risky escalation involving American ground troops — has placed Fox’s hosts in a bind. They have assured their viewers that the war is an historic success and appear unable to break with Trump due to his support among their viewers. That makes our NATO allies an appealing target as the war grinds on.

The president regularly tunes in to Fox to guide his communication and policy decisions. If he was watching before or after his speech on Wednesday, he heard vigorous support for pivoting from his inability to defeat America’s foes to punishing its friends.

Hannity: NATO is “a one-sided alliance,” by leaving “we'll probably save a lot of money”

Hannity, of the network’s three major evening hosts, is the one most committed to the U.S. war in Iran (which he had demanded for decades), the closest personally to Trump, and the loudest voice currently denouncing NATO.

Following Trump’s speech, he panned NATO as “a one-sided alliance where we only go and protect Europe” and suggested its member states had become too culturally Muslim. In response, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) uncorked a screed in which he called for the redeployment of U.S. forces from Europe because “when we needed them the most and when the world needed them the most to stop a religious Nazi regime from having a nuclear breakout, they took a pass.”

“I think that there's going to be a reevaluation and I believe America's contribution just went down dramatically, and we'll know more in the weeks ahead as this now begins to wrap up,” Hannity replied.

Later in the broadcast, the host said it was “unimaginable to me that the NATO alliance would shatter” thanks to the purported refusal by its members to agree to what “should not be a controversial assist on their part.”

“I've got to imagine the ramifications of them abandoning us in this effort is going to — this is going to be deep, profound, and long-lasting,” he added.

Fox contributor Mike Pompeo, who served as secretary of state in Trump’s first administration, characterized NATO as “feckless, not to be able to convince their own people” of the importance of the Iran war, while retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, another former Trump administration figure, said the U.S. should withdraw from the alliance and form a new one.

“Yeah, I think you're right and we'll probably save a lot of money,” Hannity replied to Kellogg. “But the fact that they did not have a moral clarity when you're dealing with the No. 1 state sponsor of terror potentially this close to acquiring nuclear weapons is breathtaking to me. And this will have reverberations, I believe, going on for decades to come.”

Ingraham: NATO is “kind of a meaningless ally” due to “weakness in Europe”

Ingraham had recently warned about potential downsides of the war, but quickly pivoted back in line with her colleagues. While previewing Trump’s speech on Wednesday’s broadcast, she claimed that “NATO turned out, in this case at least, to be what Donald Trump had predicted: kind of a meaningless ally, if allies at all.”

Her guest, the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano, responded with the evening’s most vigorous defense of the alliance. “I don't think NATO is the problem,” he said, instead pointing to “some very weak leaders inside NATO who have made some very cowardly decisions” and “look like complete yahoos.”

“What we're going to see is not NATO disbanded,” Carafano. “That's nuts. But what we're more likely to see is NATO step back up to the plate under pressure from Donald Trump, and countries throw out their own leaders because they’re weak-kneed yahoos.”

But Ingraham responded by saying that disbanding NATO should be on the table.

“Well, I'm not sure I agree with that,” she replied. “I think there's just a lot of weakness in Europe, period. Period, there's weakness. … We're so lucky we have Donald Trump as president of the United States.”

Watters: “We’ve had it with these people”

Watters joined in the NATO criticism on Wednesday, albeit in a somewhat less aggressive tone than his colleagues.

“The NATO allies, I put allies in quotes,” he said. “I mean, it's been a great alliance over the years. It's really kept the Russians off the continent until the Ukraine invasion. But it's been really one-sided, and now a lot of people are looking around at them saying no, you can't use the airspace. You can't use the base.”

“They've had it,” he added. “We've had it with these people. We love them, but we've had it.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Antisemitic Influencers Who Say They're 'J-Pilled' Know Exactly What It Means

Antisemitic Influencers Who Say They're 'J-Pilled' Know Exactly What It Means

A New York Times report on young attendees at last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference soft-peddled the movement’s antisemitism by describing some right-wingers as “J-pilled” and erroneously defining that term as “far-right slang for skepticism of Israeli influence.”

One indication that definition is inaccurate, as my former colleague Madeline Peltz pointed out in criticizing the article, is that “a few grafs later they quote a groyper who says ‘at least 60 percent of the young people here’ are fans of Nick Fuentes, who wants to deport all Jews from America.”

Another tell, of course, is that “Israel” doesn’t begin with a J — but “Jew” does. “J-pilled,” as should be extremely obvious from the name, is actually far-right slang for skepticism of Jewish influence. Those who claim to be “J-pilled” see the hidden hand of the Jewish people behind every social ill, an adaptation of the gutter antisemitism familiar from the blood-soaked anti-Jewish fraudulent tome, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

This strain of explicitly anti-Jewish sentiment is a growing problem on the right. Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist once barred from the mainstream right, broke that containment in 2025 with a wave of appearances with popular podcasters like Tucker Carlson. He and his allies have tried to use the horrific scenes of devastation the Israeli military perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza to make inroads with young Republicans and encourage them to adopt virulently antisemitic views — and polling suggests they are succeeding.

If you spend enough time watching the programs of Fuentes and his ilk, you will hear the cohort the Times describes make very clear that when they use the term “J-pilled,” they are talking about Jews, not Israel.

  • Here’s a viewer telling Fuentes that his “boomer family” is “being J-pilled” by Candace Owens talking “about the propaganda surrounding Hitler.”
  • Here’s one explaining to Hitler-praising manosphere streamer Myron Gaines (real name Amrou Fudl) that he “found out my mom is jew pilled” when he “brought up some things about the jews and she started talking about the red cows and temple.” (While reading this comment, Gaines shortened “jew pilled” to “J-pilled.”)
  • Here’s another one telling Gaines, “My sister who is J-pilled thinks the jews want Maduro dead because his politics outlaws jews! no porn, no abortion, no usury!” (When Gaines read the latter comment, he said “J’s” in both places where the text read “jews.”)

Some on the far-right, hoping to avoid being accurately tarred as antisemites, deliberately try to muddy the waters. Gaines, for example, often uses the term “J-pilled” when he is discussing Israel.

But the streamer has also made clear this is a smokescreen. During a March 2025 show, he read a viewer’s claim that “the Disney CEO (Bob Iger) the man who has been destroying movies with bs trans ideology and feminism ideology and funding shitty movies it all makes sense when you check WIKI” — a reference to Iger being Jewish.

In response, Gaines told his livestreaming audience to type “1” into the stream’s chat “if I've J-pilled you,” adding, “I gotta obviously use certain terminology here for obvious reasons, but you guys know what I'm talking about.”

“All right, sweet,” he said as the chat became a stream of people replying with 1s.

Some are less subtle about what they mean when they talk about “J-pilling.” Take Stew Peters, a prominent right-wing streamer and influencer known for bigoted commentary, violent ideation about his political foes, and deranged conspiracy theories.

“As everybody knows, The Stew Peters Show and this network broadly have been and still are to this day at the forefront of J-pilling the American people,” Peters said in November 2025. “Our people are waking up. Our people are rising up. They’re noticing, and the noticing will continue. If you think about it, it’s impossible not to notice.”

Peters then detailed who and what his supporters are “noticing” — the Jews responsible for all of society’s problems.

“Just think of everything that these walking, talking, interest-charging demons have been responsible for,” he said.

He continued: “If societal ills were a bunch of stones in the middle of a field somewhere and all of us got together walking around, turning up the stones to see what’s underneath them, under every single one of these stones, you would find a little Jew-man, grubbing his hands, smirking, wearing his tiny hat, trying to get over on the goyim. Trying to kill the goyim, when it really comes down to it.”

“Just think of all that these people are responsible for,” he added. “Usury, central banking, communism, Bolshevik communism, the Holodomor, the transatlantic slave trade, transgenderism, the normalization of homosexuality, the normalization of pedophilia, transgenderism for kids, open borders, white replacement, white genocide, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, AIPAC, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, abortion, which is just a modern-day Malachian sacrifice ritual.”

Trump Says 'Watch Mark Levin' As Fox Host Urged US Troops To Seize Iran Uranium

Trump Says 'Watch Mark Levin' As Fox Host Urged US Troops To Seize Iran Uranium

Fox News host Mark Levin suggested the U.S. military should seize Iran’s uranium — a risky escalation experts say would place troops under fire on Iranian soil for days — during a Saturday night program that President Donald Trump had urged his supporters to watch for its discussion of “the importance of hitting Iran, HARD!!!"

Under normal circumstances, the nasal-voiced screeds a sycophantic Fox news host yells on his taped weekend program wouldn’t matter for much. But Trump is often persuaded by what the network’s MAGA propagandists tell him through his television, he’s previously leaned on council from Levin with regard to Iran in particular, and earlier on Saturday, the president urged his supporters to tune in to Levin’s show that evening.

“Watch Mark Levin interview of Brilliant Marc Thiessen tonight at 8:00 P.M., on FoxNews,” Trump posted to Truth Social. “Will discuss the importance of hitting Iran, HARD!!!”

Trump’s instruction for supporters to watch Fox discourse on the prospect of further escalations in Iran comes as the war approaches a flashpoint. Iran’s regime is intact and it has successfully closed the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic victory that threatens global trade. With Trump’s initial prediction of a four-to-five-week war in doubt, U.S. troops are streaming toward the region and preparing for weeks of ground operations. The Pentagon has reportedly prepared a list of purported “final blow” options that include seizing Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal and extracting Iran’s uranium, even as Trump himself is reportedly “getting a little bored” and “wants to move on” from Iran, as a senior White House official told MS NOW.

Fox’s pro-Trump hosts are trying to influence the president’s next move. Laura Ingraham warned last week that further escalation could trigger “cascading problems for the region” and “political problems for the president,” while Sean Hannity suggested that the war is all but over and Jesse Watters said any further action would amount to a “knockout.”

Saturday’s broadcast illuminates Levin’s position among the network’s biggest hawks. And he appears to be showering Trump with praise in an effort to get the president on board with his latest escalation scheme. Levin touted Trump’s “enormous intelligence,” claimed his “victory” against Iran is “absolutely incredible,” and portrayed the war’s critics as merely Trump-haters.

The Fox-Trump feedback loop has in recent months played a role in the president’s decisions to send White House border czar Tom Homan to oversee immigration enforcement in Minnesota; prioritize the SAVE Act over all other legislation; order the deployment of ICE agents to airports; and start the war against Iran. Will it now help trigger an incredibly risky military operation?

Levin: We need ground troops in Iran because “we’ve got to get the uranium”

After spending the bulk of Saturday’s monologue praising Trump’s war and denouncing its critics (described below), Levin came to the point: He wants the president to deploy ground troops in Iran to seize Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile.

“Why would we need troops on the ground?” he explained. “Well, there's a lot of reasons, and we wouldn't need 300,000 of them.”

“We've got to get the uranium — if it cannot be destroyed, if it cannot be altered, we've got to get it,” Levin said. “That's why I am reading in the paper, we are talking about the 82nd Airborne, we're talking about these various special forces and the various military services and so forth.”

“He's not talking about sending regular Army and infantry in by the hundreds of thousands — the men he's talking about, the units he is talking about, they are specialized,” Levin continued. “And you know what else? I remember from my days in the Reagan administration, many of them are trained for a moment like this to try and secure enriched uranium. Many have been trained for moments like this.”

Thiessen, the Washington Post columnist and Fox contributor whom Trump described as “Brilliant,” likewise argued that “if we don't get that enriched uranium, and they want to get back at us for what we've done, the easiest way to do it would be to get it to al-Qaida and let them use it for a dirty bomb.”

“So we have got to get what Donald Trump correctly calls the nuclear dust before this operation is done,” Thiessen concluded.

The Wall Street Journal’s description of an operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of nuclear material buried in the middle of a hostile country during a shooting war does not sound as easy as Levin and Thiessen made it out to be. The paper reported:

Teams of U.S. forces would need to fly to the sites, likely under fire from Iranian surface-to-air missiles and drones. Once on site, combat troops would need to secure perimeters so that engineers with excavating equipment could search through debris and check for mines and booby traps.
The extraction of the material would likely need to be conducted by an elite special operations team specially trained to remove radioactive material from a conflict zone. The highly enriched uranium is likely contained in 40 to 50 special cylinders that resemble scuba tanks. They would need to be put into transportation casks to protect against accidents. That could fill several trucks, said Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at Columbia University and a former nuclear negotiator with Iran.
Unless an airfield was available, a makeshift one would need to be set up to bring equipment in and take the nuclear material out. The entire operation would take days or even a week to complete, experts said.

Trump “hasn’t made a decision on whether to give the order” and is “considering the danger to U.S. troops,” but “remains generally open to the idea,” the Journal reports.

More open, perhaps, after hearing the pitch from Levin and Thiessen.

Levin: Trump has “enormous intelligence,” his Iran “victory” is “absolutely incredible”

Before urging Trump to send U.S. ground troops to invade Iran, Levin began his Saturday monologue by offering fulsome praise for the war of choice he had urged the president to start.

“I've been thinking about the war with Iran,” he began. “I like to call it a military operation. I actually like to call it a peace mission, because that's what it is, and how incredible it is, and the magnitude of this victory. It's not a final victory, but this victory up to this point is incredible, absolutely incredible.”

Levin meandered through his justification for the war, denouncing President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which he described as “an agreement that would ensure they get a nuclear weapon,” and comparing U.S. military deaths during the Iran war with those during other U.S. conflicts dating back to the Korean War as well as fatalities from murder and fentanyl overdoses.

He ultimately claimed that Iran could have turned its enriched uranium for a “dirty bomb” and then employed terrorists to detonate it in a U.S. city. “So what the president is doing is monumental in terms of protecting the American people,” Levin explained.

The host concluded that “we're in good hands” with Trump “because he's a man with enormous intelligence, enormous common sense. He's not an ideologue. He doesn't run around with slogans. He is prudential. He looks at the facts, he looks at the challenge, and he's dealing with it.”

Thiessen likewise gushed over the president’s war.

“We're about halfway through this thing,” Thiessen claimed, “and when this is all over, this is going to go down in history as possibly the greatest military campaign the United States has waged since the American Revolution.”

Levin: War critics “aren’t serious people,” they “are people who just oppose Trump”

Levin finds his own arguments so compelling that he can’t imagine why anyone would disagree with them.

Pointing to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and recently resigned former Trump intelligence official Joe Kent, Levin commented, “These aren't serious people with serious disagreements. These aren't serious people with substantive knowledge that's different than it was before. No, no, no. These are people who just oppose Donald Trump. That's the truth.”

He later complained that Schumer, “the conga line of Democrats,” and “the woke Reich neofascist isolationists” were giving Iran “the benefit of the doubt.”

“Why would you give a terrorist regime that slaughtered Americans and is the biggest promoter of terrorism the benefit of the doubt?” he whined.

Thiessen likewise told Levin that the Democrats are “rooting for defeat,” adding, “There are people in this country who hate Donald Trump more than they hate the Iranian regime that just massacred 32,000 people in their streets.”

That’s what Trump wanted his followers to tune-in for: A totally one-sided dismissal of the Iran war’s critics in favor of continued escalation in an aimless conflict that's already spiraled out of control.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Laura Ingraham

Fox News' United Front Supporting Trump's Iran War May Be Breaking Down

Four weeks after President Donald Trump launched a poorly conceived war of choice against Iran, the lockstep support for the conflict that has characterized coverage from Fox News’ star hosts is beginning to fray. The power struggle is significant — it is not an exaggeration to suggest the course of the war might hinge on which Fox shows the president is watching.

Trump is clearly approaching a decision point over whether to further escalate the war. U.S. and Israeli forces have done a lot of damage to Iranian military targets, but its regime is intact, still controls its stockpiles of enriched uranium, and has closed the Strait of Hormuz, threatening the global trade in oil, natural gas, and fertilizer. The Pentagon is sending thousands of troops to the region and reportedly prepping options for a “final blow” — some of which would involve deploying U.S. forces on Iranian soil.

When Trump is considering policy options, he often takes guidance from his loyal propagandists at Fox. This Fox-Trump feedback loop has in recent months played a role in the president’s decisions to send White House border czar Tom Homan to oversee immigration enforcement in Minnesota; prioritize the SAVE Act over all other legislation; order the deployment of ICE agents to airports; and start the war against Iran.

Against that backdrop, Fox News host Laura Ingraham warned on Wednesday’s show that further U.S. action could produce devastating unintended consequences and suggested that Trump should refocus his attention on the domestic economy and political situation.

“Iran knows it cannot win militarily, so it's using the leverage it has by prolonging the conflict,” she said during her monologue at the top of the show. “Now, what do they want to do? They want to inflict maximum economic pain on the region, on the U.S., [on] the global economy as much as possible until they think Trump relents. But the White House doesn't seem to be blinking.”

The host then aired a clip of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt warning at her press briefing that day that “President Trump does not bluff, and he is prepared to unleash hell” against Iran.

Ingraham did not seem impressed by Leavitt’s rhetoric.

“Well, the problem is obviously unleashing hell means destroying infrastructure, which itself causes a series of cascading problems for the region, including maybe outside the region — political problems for the president in a midterm election year,” she said.

Her air of skepticism continued throughout the show.

While interviewing Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), she noted Pentagon reports of thousands of successful missions but commented, “I mean, this is a devastating blow, yet you know, we're still there.”

“It's not even a month old, obviously,” she continued, before asking, “But are you concerned about the public and people? Again, very short attention spans, very impatient for victory, as is President Trump, I might add. But in an election year, it's easy to say politics don't matter, but at some point politics do come into play.”

And in a third segment, she highlighted the disastrous polling on the Iran war, commenting, “It looks like people are pretty impatient. The American people are sending a message to President Trump that it's time to put the focus back on the home front.”

Ingraham is inching toward the type of dissent that has been virtually absent from Fox’s coverage of the war, even as the broader right-wing media has split. Her colleagues have played key roles in convincing Trump to attack in the first place and are pushing for risky escalations. Ingraham herself briefly quibbled with Trump’s handling of an apparent U.S. strike that leveled an Iranian school, killing scores of children, but had supported the war itself, which she declared three weeks ago that Trump had already won.

But if Ingraham is getting cold feet and trying to convince Trump not to escalate a war the public has soured on, she remains an outlier at the network. Indeed, if the president tuned in for the two hours following Ingraham’s program, he saw her prime-time colleagues Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity argue not only that the war is going well and that Trump will inevitably lead the U.S. to victory, but that anyone who disagrees must want America to lose the war because they hate the president.

Watters began his show with a 10-minute monologue whose thesis was that “the Iranian regime is losing leverage fast as we continue to carry out thousands of sorties over enemy airspace.” After detailing various tactical victories, he touted a potential escalation.

“[President] 47 could be eyeing a knockout — Iran's crown jewel, Kharg Island,” he said. “The Republican Guard has been preparing for battle, laying mines, booby trapping, loading up on Stingers, but retired top brass says our military is ready to shock and seize the terrain by air, by sea. We don't know if it's going to happen, but if it does happen, the Iranians won't know it's coming.”

“Iran looks like this is their last gasp, but some people would rather America lose the war because they hate Trump,” Watters concluded. “So far, this is the cleanest, most surgical and one-sided operation in American military history. Now, anything could happen, war is hell, it's unpredictable, but people in the know in Washington think we're about to close it out with a pretty big blow.”

Hannity, in his opening monologue, likewise declared: “Many on the left are now rooting for America to lose. Others seem to be hoping for another Vietnam-style quagmire. Why? Because Democrats care more about their political ambition rather than the future, safety, and security of your children and your grandchildren.”

“But tonight, President Trump is ignoring all the hysteria and pushing for peace one way or the other,” he continued. “If Iran's obliterated regime will not agree to a lasting agreement, this president has pledged he will continue to decimate their resolve through force, but that's really going to be up to them. They might unleash hell, otherwise.”

After airing a clip from Leavitt’s press briefing, Hannity added, “The message from President Trump is clear: Work with the U.S. or you will be killed.”

To which Ingraham might reply — what if killing them creates “cascading problems for the region”? As of yet, Watters and Hannity aren’t expressing any such concerns. And who the president is watching may determine the shape of things to come.

Legacy News Outlets That Bent Knee To Trump Losing Their Credibility -- And Audience

Legacy News Outlets That Bent Knee To Trump Losing Their Credibility -- And Audience

It turns out that there isn’t a ratings bump for MAGA capitulation.

David Ellison, the son of President Donald Trump’s megabillionaire ally Larry Ellison, took control of CBS last year following a corrupt deal that saw its parent company settle a lawsuit with the president and agree to implement a new conservative ombudsman for CBS News. As part of that takeover, he also installed conservative journalist Bari Weiss at the helm, promising that her “entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision” would “invigorate” the network. But six months into Weiss’ rightward makeover of CBS, the fruits of her labors include cheers from Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for making the network more palatable to their aims, complaints from the CBS newsroom that she is dismantling its independence — and, it now appears, a viewer exodus.

Status’ Oliver Darcy got ahold of some CBS News ratings data from the first quarter of 2026, and it is brutal. CBS Evening News has lost seven percent of viewers year-over-year, placing it “on track for its lowest-rated first quarter of the 21st century in both total viewers and the advertiser-coveted 25-54 demographic,” while CBS Mornings plummeted 13 percent and “is pacing toward its lowest-rated quarter on record in both total audience and the key demo.” Meanwhile, the audiences of competitor shows at ABC News and NBC News grew over the same period.

The ratings collapse is a devastating indictment of the strategy Ellison and Weiss are executing at CBS — and a blaring warning for CNN if Ellison is able to complete his takeover of that network and let Weiss run the same playbook there.

Meanwhile, new data from the Alliance for Audited Media show that while average daily print circulation among major audited newspapers saw year-over-year declines across the board in the six months running through the end of September 2025, the biggest drops came at The Washington Post, which fell 21.2 percent followed by the Los Angeles Times, down 19.8 percent. Their billionaire owners — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and biotech mogul Patrick Soon-Shiong, respectively — had responded to Trump’s return to the White House by trying to shift their papers to the right.

None of this should come as a surprise

Ellison and Weiss have suggested that the core problem for American media is that the public does not trust news outlets, and that the reason for this is that the public perceives those outlets as too far left and too critical of the right. They propose to win over a larger audience by deliberately course-correcting in the opposite direction.

“We are not producing a product that enough people want,” Weiss said at a CBS News staff town hall in January. Weiss attributed this to two factors. “First: Not enough people trust us. Not you. Us. As in: the mainstream media,” she said. “Second: We are not doing enough to meet audiences where they are. So they are leaving us.”

Weiss is correct that trust in traditional media has fallen dramatically in recent decades, particularly among conservatives — indeed, this is a banal truth that everyone remotely connected to the media knows. But her strategy of conceding that potential viewers are correct to distrust journalists and seeking to “meet audiences where they are” by signaling that coverage will now be deliberately shifted to the right has had the obvious result of driving away the existing audience without adding a new one.

CBS News’ viewers either liked what they were already watching or they liked what watching Edward R. Murrow’s old network said about them. When the network’s new ownership and management proposed taking its programming in a dramatically different direction in search of a different audience — as the wildly unpopular president cheered — the existing viewers could see that, and some decided that CBS is no longer worth their patronage.

Weiss’ theory of the case is that these losses could be made up by new viewers with more right-leaning views. But the decline in public trust for traditional media among Republicans stems at least in part from a decades-long strategy pursued deliberately by the GOP and conservative movement. That effort revolves around simultaneously denouncing news outlets as liberal propaganda while encouraging conservatives to instead patronize new, deliberately right-wing news sources. And it’s been taken to another level under Trump, who relentlessly attacks the press while using state power to reduce its influence and lift up the MAGA media operation.

That dynamic makes it wildly implausible that the shift Weiss enacted would win over a sizable new segment of viewers. Her version of CBS may garner praise from Trump, but people who might be swayed by his comments already have — and are likely already patronizing — a plethora of pro-Trump outlets. You could imagine a scenario where some slightly more right-wing viewers of the ABC and NBC news shows switched to watching the new CBS. But instead, the data Darcy cited suggests, CBS appears to be shedding viewers who are instead watching its competitors — or exiting broadcast television altogether as their news source.

As for Bezos’ Post and Soon-Shiong’s Times, when the owners similarly bet on trying to make their outlets more acceptable to Trump, their existing audiences looked for the exits and were not replaced. The efforts may win over the likes of Tucker Carlson or even the president himself, but MAGA isn’t rushing to buy subscriptions.

For Ellison, Bezos, and Soon-Shiong, the declines in their news outlets may be a small price to pay to win over Trump. Each owner has massive business holdings outside of the press and can afford the losses from tearing down their news outlets if it wins the Trump administration’s support for their desired mergers, contracts, or patents.

The journalists facing layoffs from their outlets — and the public who lose access to their reporting — are the ones who will actually suffer from this doomed strategy.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Trump's Shambolic Fox News Policy Making Hits American Airports

Trump's Shambolic Fox News Policy Making Hits American Airports

President Donald Trump threw his administration into chaos on Saturday by demanding the stationing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at U.S. airports in response to long lines triggered by the expiration of funding for the Transportation Security Administration.

Top administration officials offered disparate explanations for what those ICE agents would be doing — explanations which also seemingly diverted from Trump’s own vision — as they scrambled to turn the president’s social media posts into some sort of coherent policy.

Meanwhile, ICE and Department of Homeland Security sources are grumbling to the press that the deployment will reduce their ability to focus on the president's deportation agenda.

The president-mandated mayhem appears to stem from Trump’s habit of governing based on policy ideas he gets from his television, particularly the MAGA talking heads at Fox News. This Fox-Trump feedback loop has at various times driven everything from administration staffing to legislative and communications strategy to presidential pardons and federal contracts.

Both the problem — long airport lines caused by Trump’s opposition to funding TSA — and his response — stationing ICE agents at the airports — seem to have their origins in Fox segments he had been watching.

A government shutdown is hitting TSA and it’s Trump’s fault (with a Fox assist)

A partial government shutdown which impacts DHS is causing major disruptions at some U.S. airports, including long security lines. And while that shutdown originated with Democratic opposition to the Trump administration’s lawless immigration enforcement, it continues because of the president’s Fox-fueled demand that future appropriations come stapled to his unrelated legislative priorities.

Senate Democrats have refused to support appropriations for ICE or Customs and Border Protection absent reforms to their operations in light of the rampages by those agencies, while Senate Republicans have to date blocked Democratic attempts to separately fund TSA and other DHS agencies. And Trump is reportedly standing in the way of a deal pitched to him by Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) in which “Senate Republicans would support funding all of DHS except ICE,” funding for which would be handled separately on a partisan basis via reconciliation.

What explains Trump’s intransigence, which has become the primary cause of the airport lines? He is using the TSA funding as leverage as he tries to ram through the SAVE America Act, legislation otherwise stymied in the Senate that would rewrite the nation’s election laws. And he is doing so in response to something he saw on Fox.

On March 8, the president declared on Truth Social that he had been so moved by MAGA activist Scott Presler’s comments about the SAVE Act on Fox & Friends that morning that he would sign no other legislation until it was passed.

“It must be done immediately,” he posted. “It supersedes everything else. MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE. I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed, AND NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION - GO FOR THE GOLD: MUST SHOW VOTER I.D. & PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP: NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS EXCEPT FOR MILITARY - ILLNESS, DISABILITY, TRAVEL: NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS: NO TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION [SIC] FOR CHILDREN!”

The implications of this pledge for TSA funding seem to have largely gone unnoticed. But on Sunday night, Trump explicitly tied the two together.

“I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,’” Trump posted to Truth Social, claiming, “It is far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate.”

After denouncing what he portrayed as the Democratic position on DHS funding and rattling off a list of the SAVE Act’s provisions, he urged Senate Republicans to combine the two, writing: “Lump everything together as one, and VOTE!!! Kill the Filibuster, and stay in D.C. for Easter, if necessary.”

Right-wing radio caller -> Fox segment -> presidential post -> policy

ICE agents are currently patrolling some U.S. airports after a right-wing radio caller proposed the idea, the show’s host took it to Fox, and the president adopted the policy in a social media post, as Semafor’s Ben Smith first detailed in a Sunday report.

“Linda from Arizona” called into The Clay and Buck Show on Friday afternoon proposing to “bring in ICE agents” as “a solution to the TSA problem.” Clay Travis, the show’s co-host, liked the idea so much that he brought it up that night during a hit on Fox’s Jesse Watters Primetime.

“I had a caller on the show, The Clay and Buck Show, today, Charlie, had an interesting idea,” Travis told guest host Charlie Hurt. “What if President Trump announced that ICE agents were now going to be supplementing TSA agents inside of all of the airports? The ICE agents are still being paid. How quickly would Democrats panic if he said hey, we're going to put some ICE agents in line with the TSA, help to expedite everybody?”

“And oh, by the way, if we think you might be an illegal when you're coming through to try to get on an airplane, we're going to go ahead and arrest you at the airport, too,” he added. “I think that might solve things in a hurry. It was a great caller suggestion. But it also goes to let's let people actually do something normal, go through security and get on airplanes — Democrat, Republican and independent, I think it connects with everybody.”

“Yes, it absolutely does,” Hurt replied.

Hurt and Travis weren’t the only ones enamored with “Linda from Arizona’s” idea — the next morning, the president adopted the proposal. In a Saturday morning Truth Social post, Trump stressed — just as Travis had — that the ICE agents would be used both for security and for arresting undocumented immigrants.

“If the Radical Left Democrats don’t immediately sign an agreement to let our Country, in particular, our Airports, be FREE and SAFE again, I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before,” he posted, “including the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country, with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia, who have totally destroyed, with the approval of a corrupt Governor, Attorney General, and Congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, the once Great State of Minnesota.”

Trump made clear that the plan was moving forward in another post two hours later, writing, “I look forward to moving ICE in on Monday, and have already told them to, ‘GET READY.’ NO MORE WAITING, NO MORE GAMES!”

“The White House hasn’t commented on whether Trump did, in fact, hear the TV segment and act accordingly,” CNN’s Brian Stelter noted Monday. “But Trump has a decade-long track record of watching Fox and posting his reactions on social media.”

In another sign that the policy process driving this policy is the Fox-Trump feedback loop, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump's “first post Saturday came as a surprise to officials inside ICE and at DHS, who have spent the weekend trying to figure out how it could work, according to three people familiar with the matter.”

Indeed, in Sunday interviews, two top Trump officials one would expect to be involved in executing the policy offered starkly different explanations for what ICE agents would be doing at the airports.

White House “border czar” Tom Homan, who Trump posted Sunday morning is “in charge” of the ICE deployment, stressed that the agents would be assigned to tasks like guarding airport exits, which he said would free up the TSA officers doing that work to do screening to reduce lines.

“I don’t see an ICE agent looking at an X-ray machine because they’re not trained in that, but there are certain parts of security that TSA is doing that we can move them off those jobs and put them in the specialized jobs and help move those lines,” he told CNN’s Dana Bash.

But the same morning, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy suggested that the ICE agents would be screening passengers alongside TSA officers.

“TSA agents are law enforcement,” he said on ABC’s This Week. “They know how to pat people down, they know how to run the X-ray machines because they are, again, under Homeland Security with TSA. So if we can bring in other assets and tools to assist TSA to get rid of these lines, yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.”

Notably, both Homan and Duffy are in their administration roles at least in part due to their Fox ties. Homan, who has gone through the revolving door from the first Trump administration to a stint as a Fox contributor and then back to the second Trump administration, has taken on a larger role overseeing ICE operations after a Fox & Friends co-host suggested increasing his responsibilities. Duffy, meanwhile, is a former Fox contributor and host (he is also married to a current Fox & Friends Weekend co-host, who worked in that role alongside the nation’s current defense secretary).

Homan and Duffy both seem to be trying to salvage some sort of workable plan from the president’s Fox-stoked half-idea. Notably, neither pitched what Travis initially floated and Trump actually asked for in his initial post — ICE agents specifically tasked with arresting undocumented immigrants en masse. And that’s what the president still says is going to happen.

A reporter asked Trump at a Monday morning gaggle, “Will we see ICE arresting illegal migrants at airports?”

“Yeah,” he responded. “That's why the Democrats are going crazy.”

The president added that ICE agents “love it because they're able to now arrest illegals as they come into the country. That's very fertile territory.”

That’s not what the Journal is hearing. “Officials at ICE and DHS expressed frustration with the plan, saying it will distract from Trump’s core goal of deporting as many people in the country illegally as possible,” the paper reported.

It’s no wonder they are concerned. Either the ICE agents have been moved away from positions supporting the president’s mass deportation effort and are not going to be arresting immigrants at the airports, or they are going to be carrying out their brutal arrest operations in front of airport crowds and end up further damaging the agency’s reputation. The president has put ICE in a no-win situation, all to support a policy of holding TSA funding for ransom to secure unrelated legislation.

That’s what happens when you govern via Fox segment.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

How Fox News Is Hiding Trump's $200 Billion Iran War Funding Request

How Fox News Is Hiding Trump's $200 Billion Iran War Funding Request

Fox News isn’t bothering to sell the staggering cost of the ill-conceived war President Donald Trump launched against Iran.

The Trumpist propaganda network provided roughly 11 minutes of coverage through Thursday to the administration’s request for an eye-popping $200 billion in supplementary spending from Congress — and less than 1 minute of discussion on its prime-time block, according to a Media Matters review.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday night that the Pentagon “has asked the White House to approve a more than $200 billion request to Congress to fund the war in Iran,” a figure subsequently confirmed by other news outlets. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not dispute the number at a Thursday morning press conference, though he indicated it “could move.”

The request “is expected to face a rocky path in Congress,” according to The Wall Street Journal, as lawmakers say “they want to see more details of the proposal amid concerns that the U.S. could become embroiled in another costly long-term war,” and even Republicans are expressing skepticism about its odds of passage.

But so far, Trump’s Fox propaganda wing isn’t engaged in trying to make the case for the funds.

The $200 billion figure has not been mentioned on the programs of Fox stars Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, or Greg Gutfeld, or on the panel show The Five.

On Jesse Watters Primetime, guest host Charlie Hurt spent 44 seconds of Thursday’s show accusing Democrats who refuse to support the spending of siding with Iran and against the troops.

“The Pentagon is asking for more money to eliminate the bad guys, and it's not just for Iran,” Hurt claimed. “Trump says it's for keeping the whole world safe. And guess whose side the Democrats are on?”

He then aired a video of a reporter telling Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), “They're asking for $200 billion now for this war,” and Ocasio-Cortez responding that she won’t support the request because “this administration has plunged the American people into a war that we don't want to be in.”

“Soldiers are risking their lives to do what every president of either party, going back decades, said had to be done,” Hurt responded. “The Democrats don't want to give them the money to finish the job.”

That was the only discussion of the $200 billion war funding figure on Fox’s 8-11 p.m. prime-time block.

The request for war funding drew only 19 seconds of coverage on Thursday’s edition of the popular morning show Fox & Friends, with co-host Brian Kilmeade noting the $200 billion figure and asking, “Are Democrats gonna look to defund a war again?”

The remainder of the network’s coverage of the figure through Thursday consisted of reports from correspondents on America’s Newsroom and Special Report; a handful of passing mentions; and panel discussions on Special Report and Fox News @ Night.

Such lackluster coverage might suffice to help Trump ram a war spending bill through Congress if the war were popular, the consequences at home limited, and Republicans lawmakers united. But under the present circumstances, the network’s propagandists are going to need to develop some talking points if they hope to pull it across the finish line over the weeks to come.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Fox News Drives Trump Bus Over 'Disloyal, Trump-Hating Leaker' Joe Kent

Fox News Drives Trump Bus Over 'Disloyal, Trump-Hating Leaker' Joe Kent

The White House responded to Joe Kent’s Tuesday resignation as director of the National Counterterrorism Center over President Donald Trump’s ill-conceived war of choice in Iran with a comically lazy smear campaign that Fox News’ MAGA propagandists vigorously channeled.

After Kent wrote in a letter to the president that he was stepping down because he could not “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran” and that it “posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Fox’s hosts and guests described him as the “liberal darling du jour” and a “Trump hater” who “was about to be fired” and “never should have been in that position of leadership.”

Notably, none of them seem to blame Trump for elevating Kent — a notorious conspiracy theorist who unsuccessfully ran for Congress with backing from the likes of Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones — to the nation’s top counterterrorism post in the first place. Nor did Kent himself blame Trump for starting the war with Iran: He argued the president had been “deceive[d]” by an “echo chamber” composed of Israelis (a revival of blood-soaked antisemitic narratives) as well as “influential members of the American media,” a possible reference to Fox’s own stars.

Fox did not have much to say in the first hours after Kent’s announcement. But after Trump denounced Kent from the Oval Office, saying he had “always thought” Kent was “very weak on security” and calling it “a good thing that he’s out because he said that Iran was not a threat,” the propaganda network geared up on the president’s behalf.

Aishah Hasnie, a Fox White House correspondent, was the vector for an anonymous “senior administration official” to attack Kent. Hasnie posted to social media that her source had said Kent was “a known leaker” who “was cut out of POTUS intelligence briefings months ago” and “has not been part of any Iran planning discussions or briefings at all.” (The source also claimed “the WH told DNI Tulsi Gabbard he should be fired for suspected leaks,” but other Hasnie sources disputed that.)

Likewise, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt criticized Kent’s claim that Iran posed “no imminent threat to our nation,” claiming: “As President Trump has clearly and explicitly stated, he had strong and compelling evidence that Iran was going to attack the United States first. This evidence was compiled from many sources and factors.”

The administration’s argument is thus Trump appointed Kent as the nation’s top counterterrorism official even though the president believed he was “very weak on security,” and he subsequently didn’t see all the bulletproof evidence that Iran was an imminent threat to the United States because he had been cut out of classified meetings on the subject — but not fired — for being a “known leaker.”

Meanwhile, the administration has produced no evidence that Iran was preparing an attack to either the public or Congress. Indeed, according to Reuters, Pentagon briefers “acknowledged in closed-door briefings with congressional staff … that there was no intelligence suggesting Iran planned to attack U.S. forces first.”

Fox runs with the Kent attacks — without implicating Trump

None of this hangs together, but it was more than enough for Fox’s stable of propagandists, who ran with those talking points while ignoring their damning implications for the president.

“Respect to Joe Kent's service, he is an American veteran, but he never should have been in that position of leadership,” Hudson Institute senior fellow Rebeccah Heinrichs said on Fox’s America Reports, albeit without referencing who nominated him to the post in the first place.

“He was leading a counterterrorism unit, and Iran is the greatest source of terrorism,” she continued. “And even last year, Joe Kent even alluded to the fact that the Iranians were trying to assassinate President Trump. So clearly he should never have been in that position of leadership, and it's a good thing that he has decided to step aside.”

Fox host Laura Ingraham called Kent “the liberal darling du jour,” citing praise of his “very huffy letter” on other networks.

Ingraham then brought on Dan Bongino, the Fox contributor who sandwiched a year as deputy director of the FBI between tenures as a right-wing podcaster. Bongino downplayed Kent’s role in the administration and claimed that the “open source” evidence shows Iran was an imminent threat and that Trump “has a bevy of material that if he could do the Men in Black thing and erase your mind tomorrow, if he told you right now, you would come to the imminent threat conclusion in a snap.”

Ingraham added that “a senior U.S. official told Fox on background that Joe Kent was cut out of presidential intel briefings months ago due to allegations that he was suspected of leaking and that he hasn't been part of any Iran discussions or briefings,” though she caveated that “he's beloved” and “served his country, you know, proudly.”

Fox host and Trump shill Sean Hannity, after praising the Iran campaign, commented, “Now, a handful of very loud, oh, let's say isolationist Democrats, people that have agendas, once pretending in some cases to be part of President Trump's base, they're not happy.”

“This includes the now former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent,” he added, before suggesting Kent is a “Trump hater” pushing “conspiracy theories” and a “Democratic talking point.”

Hannity went on to claim that Trump would not “be swayed by lobbyists, politicians, countries, world leaders, the media, or anyone else on planet Earth,” and disputed Kent’s claim that Iran had not posed an “imminent threat” on the grounds that Iran was purportedly “a week away from 11 nuclear bombs potentially being built.”

On Fox News @ Night, former Republican National Committee spokesperson Elizabeth Pipko cited past Kent comments she said made “the perfect argument” for Trump’s strikes on Iran. “I fear that what he did was actually not sincere, not genuine,” she added. “And I think when American troops overseas are risking it all for us, a move like this and a statement like that is actually dangerous.”

And the co-hosts of Fox & Friends provided a perfect on-message recap for their viewers on Wednesday morning:

Lawrence Jones first brought up Kent, prompting Brian Kilmeade by saying that “some people in the administration” are “known to be leakers.”

Kilmeade, one of the biggest Iran hawks on Fox, replied that it was “just incredible,” branding Kent as part of “the podcast isolationist wing” and that his letter “said hey, Democrats, we have something for you to talk about.”

After the group talked up the case for war and aired Trump’s comments criticizing Kent, Jones commented, “That's why the administration cut him out of briefings months ago.”

“He didn’t have the intel, and obviously they didn't trust him to be in the inner circle on the decision making,” Jones added.

Kilmeade stressed that by issuing his letter, Kent had been disloyal to Trump. “You can do whatever your conscience wants you to do,” he commented. “But by doing it in this way, he's actually hurting the guy that gave him the best job of his life after he lost two straight congressional races.”

“Good point, good point,” Ainsley Earhardt commented. “And they say he was about to be fired, people had suggested that.”

None of them questioned why Trump nominated such an ignorant, disloyal, deceitful person to such an important post in the first place.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Trump Administration Demands American Press Propagandize Its Iran War

Trump Administration Demands American Press Propagandize Its Iran War

We are two weeks into President Donald Trump’s ill-conceived war of choice against Iran, and the president is already suggesting his administration should shut down news outlets for producing critical reports — or even consider treason charges based on spurious claims of collusion with America’s enemies.

Though U.S. and Israeli forces have successfully bombed a wide array of Iranian targets and assassinated its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran has followed through with its strategic doctrine by closing the Strait of Hormuz, shutting down a major channel for the global energy and fertilizer trades.

As a result, Trump is begging/demanding foreign navies bail him out by sending ships to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, deploying additional troops and ships to the region for unknown reasons, lifting sanctions on Russia in hopes of lowering the price of oil, denying reports that a Pentagon investigation preliminarily found the U.S. military accidentally incinerated scores of Iranian schoolchildren with an errant missile — and railing against the American press for refusing to report that the war is going well.

Meanwhile, Trump’s hand-picked Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, is signaling to broadcast stations that they will face regulatory retribution if they don’t “correct course."

It’s all part of the authoritarian playbook Trump wields against news outlets that produce anything less than Fox News-style propaganda. The protections of the First Amendment ensure that those outlets could likely prevail in court — but fighting is expensive, and over the course of Trump’s second term so far, the corporate moguls who control them have proven unnervingly unwilling to do so.

Trump rails against press, demands government retribution

Last week, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly bemoaned that the network’s coverage is offering lockstep support for Trump’s Iranian “excursion.”

“Now it's, you cheerlead the war, support the military industrial complex, or … you're a loser,” she said on her podcast. “It's infuriating because we're talking about life and death. We're talking about American life or death. And this is a dereliction of duty.”

As Kelly suggests, when Trump turns his television to Fox, he is getting unhinged validation of his efforts. But the president is not satisfied with that. He wants every American news outlet producing the same Fox-style war propaganda.

Trump used what he baselessly described as “an intentionally misleading headline by the Fake News Media” to denounce the press in a Saturday morning Truth Social post.“The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (in particular), and other Lowlife 'Papers’ and Media actually want us to lose the War,” he wrote. “Their terrible reporting is the exact opposite of the actual facts! They are truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they cause the United States of America.”

In another post on Sunday evening, the president baselessly claimed that Iran had been “working in close coordination with the Fake News Media” to promote a fake, AI-generated video depicting a U.S. ship burning in the Persian Gulf.

“The story was knowingly FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!” Trump posted. “The fact is, Iran is being decimated, and the only battles they ‘win’ are those that they create through AI, and are distributed by Corrupt Media Outlets.”

(In reality, responsible news outlets have been debunking that video, not distributing it, according to CNN’s Brian Stelter.)

“It's pretty criminal because our media companies, who have no credibility whatsoever, are putting out information that they know is false, and it's a very dangerous thing for the country,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One later that night, “I think they could be in serious jeopardy."

Trump’s weekend anti-press binge followed coverage complaints from Pete Hegseth, the former Fox & Friends weekend host who now heads the Pentagon, who used a press conference on Friday morning to gripe extensively about the banners he has seen on TV news coverage:

Yet some in this crew, in the press, just can't stop. Allow me to make a few suggestions. People look up at the TV and they see banners, they see headlines. I used to be in that business. And I know that everything is written intentionally.

For example, a banner or a headline: “Mideast war intensifies,” splashing on the screen the last couple of days, alongside visuals of civilian or energy targets that Iran has hit, because that's what they do. What should the banner read instead?

How about, ‘Iran increasingly desperate,’ because they are. They know it and so do you, if it can be admitted.

Hegseth posited that an “actual patriotic press” would produce such coverage. He also decried a CNN report detailing how the Trump administration “failed to fully account for the potential consequences” of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz. “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” he commented, referencing a Trump ally’s effort to take over CNN’s parent company with the help of the administration.

With Carr, a cause for alarm

It is disturbing enough that the president of the United States is a deranged authoritarian who responds to a faltering war by ranting about its coverage. But what makes it worse is that his administration is filled with apparatchicks eager to carry out his demands for retribution.

Carr, who was reportedly with the president at his Mar-A-Lago club over the weekend, responded to Trump’s initial post complaining about journalists who “actually want us to lose the War” by threatening the licenses of broadcast stations that produce critical coverage.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions - also known as the fake news - have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr wrote. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not."

Carr was nonspecific about how broadcasters could avoid reprisal (and Trump had lashed out at newspapers, not broadcast networks, in his post), but he’s a hack who is typically willing to carry Trump’s water no matter how absurd the underlying complaint may be.

Trump signaled his approval for Carr’s threats in his Sunday evening “TREASON” post, writing, “I am so thrilled to see Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations."

Stelter, in an extensive report drawing on comments from First Amendment lawyers, notes that Carr “has very little power to follow through” and that television stations, if they are willing to fight such attempted reprisals in court, “are not at serious risk of being banned."

“Any government action against a licensee would cause a protracted legal battle, even more so given the current media-bashing climate, because a station would likely cite Trump’s retributive streak and mount a First Amendment case,” Stelter wrote.

There is a strong argument that stations would be victorious if they fought Carr’s attempts to strip their licenses. But there were also strong arguments that ABC News and CBS News would be victorious if they fought the lawsuits Trump filed over their coverage in 2024. The problem was that rather than going to court on behalf of a free press, Disney and Paramount, their parent companies, decided it was in the interest of their broader business holdings to fold.

The advantage Trump and Carr have in their fight to cudgel the press into line is that it can be very expensive to fight the federal government on behalf of the First Amendment — and what the last year shows is that many people who own or control news outlets don’t care enough about such principles to do it. And Disney and Paramount had much deeper pockets to pay lawyers than an individual local broadcast news station does. Even Sinclair Broadcast Network, which owns or operates nearly 200 stations across the country, has a market cap of around $1 billion, compared to roughly $175 billion for Disney.

If Carr threatens the licenses of Sinclair stations, are its pro-Trump owners really going to go to the mat for the free press rather than using his complaints as an opportunity to push coverage even further to the right?

It’s also worth taking seriously Trump’s threats of treason charges against news outlets. The Justice Department is now staffed by loyalists like former Fox host Jeanine Pirro who are willing to follow through on his demands for political prosecutions. Those efforts keep failing — but they raise the cost of dissent and thus chill free speech.

And that’s what the president wants, as Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt made clear when she channeled him on Monday morning.

“The president has said enough with this coverage from other networks that are not telling you the truth, that are so negative about what’s going on,” she said. “This is a pro-America fight, and every network needs to get on board with that."

And if they aren’t, there will be consequences.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Fox's Ultra-Hawkish Hosts Are Thrilled With Iran War -- And Eager To Escalate

Fox's Ultra-Hawkish Hosts Are Thrilled With Iran War -- And Eager To Escalate

Less than two weeks after President Donald Trump launched an ill-conceived, ill-planned war in Iran, the Fox News Cabinet members who urged him to launch military strikes there are either pushing him to escalate or stressing what a great job he’s done.

Zeteo’s Justin Baragona and Asawin Suebsang confirmed on Thursday that televised input from the Fox propagandists Trump trusts played a role in the president’s decision to launch a war of choice. Trump regularly shapes policy based on what he sees on the network, and hosts Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Brian Kilmeade were loudly urging the president to attack Iran in the days before he did so.

Though U.S. and Israeli forces have successfully bombed a wide array of Iranian targets and assassinated its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the U.S. military also appears to have killed scores of Iranian children with a Tomahawk missile strike on a school, Iran has now taken the incredibly obvious step of closing the Strait of Hormuz — the chokepoint through which about 20 percent of global crude oil and liquified natural gas flows — and it remains unclear what a strategic victory could look like.

But if Trump is watching his favorite morning show, Fox & Friends, he’s hearing Kilmeade call for an expanded mission that would require putting troops on the ground in Iran.

“We killed their commander, and we’re killing a lot more, and the Israelis’ intelligence on the ground is unbelievable,” he said on Thursday. “Hopefully, that leads to grabbing that uranium out of some of those destroyed sites, maybe that’ll be something that will be announced shortly.”

Kilmeade’s casual invocation of “grabbing that uranium” elides the difficulties involved in attempting to secure and transfer potentially over a thousand pounds of material that has likely been dispersed across a hostile foreign country and possibly outside of it.

Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, detailed the potential dilemmas of such an operation in a Wednesday appearance on MS NOW.

Kilmeade has also suggested U.S. forces seize Iranian territory — using language that seems carefully chosen to appeal to the president.

“I just wonder how soon until we decide to grab that Kharg Island, where 90% of all the Iranian oil is shipped,” Kilmeade offered on Wednesday.

“If we have that, you want the ultimate leverage, we have it,” he added, “I just think that that's something the president has talked about since the ‘80s, everyone knows it, and that would really get their attention.”

Kilmeade went on to say that the administration could be hesitating because if the U.S. seizes Kharg Island, there would be “a temporary uptick” in the cost of oil during the “transition.”

“But Iran can't adjust economically without it,” he added. “So if you want to create ultimate leverage on a regime that is so scared, they are afraid to put their supreme leader out in public, I think that's one way to do it.”

He concluded, appearing to address Trump directly: “If you are in control of it, you literally are doing what you did with [Venezuelan President] Delcy Rodriguez. We took all their ships and said nothing is coming in or out. We will control your oil. We flipped the government to take Maduro out, and now we’re refining their oil.”

Kharg Island “is arguably the country’s most sensitive economic target,” Dan Sabbagh, defense and security editor for The Guardian, wrote on Wednesday, but “an effort to seize the island, given its size, would be likely to require a sizeable and sustained operation, greater than a typical special forces incursion.”

He further reported that “experts say bombing or capturing the site with US forces would be likely to cause a sustained increase to already surging oil prices, as it would amount to taking the entirety of Iran’s daily crude exports offline.” That could cause a “tailspin” for global markets, even if oil shipments subsequently resumed.

Levin and Hannity can’t stop praising the “extraordinary leader” who launched the war

While Kilmeade is focused on coming up with new ways for Trump to risk the lives of American service members and undermine global financial and political stability, Hannity and Levin have been telling their viewers — which could include the president on any given night — that the war is going swimmingly and that anyone who says otherwise is lying.

“After just one week, Iran's Air Force, Army, Navy is in tatters,” Hannity said Monday. “Its radical leaders, they're all dead. A murderous regime is now a shadow of its former self.”

He went on to explain that in Iran, “a new supreme leader, ayatollah, has been announced and his days as of this hour are likely numbered” and the country “is apparently struggling to put up a fight.”

On Tuesday, Hannity praised Trump for demanding Iran remove any mines it had placed in the Strait of Hormuz, commenting: “Tonight, the message from the Trump administration and President Trump is crystal clear. Any Iranian ship that poses a threat to the freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz will be obliterated without warning and sent straight to hell and the bottom of the sea in a million pieces.”

He added, “A little advice to anyone still alive in Iran's Navy, dock your vessel, head to dry land, and maybe you want to go home and join your families.”

And on Wednesday, Hannity began his nightly monologue with “the very latest figures out of Operation Epic Fury.”

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): Iranian ballistic missile attacks, they’re down by over 90%. More than 5,000 targets, now, have been eliminated.
Air dominance has been secured. More than Iranian vessels have been obliterated, including all four Soleimani-class warships. The old ayatollah, supreme leader, and all of his top deputies and the next layer of leadership are all dead.
The new ayatollah is too afraid to appear anywhere in public. In fact, we don’t even know if he’s dead or alive.
Now, all of this in less than 11 days. America and Israel are dominating the evil regime in Iran.

On Saturday, Levin lavished Trump with praise for attacking Iran, calling him “an extraordinary leader and president who spent most of his life as a captain of industry, several industries, in fact, who gave up an enormously successful career to serve his country, a country he so dearly loves.”

He went on to attack those who suggest U.S. aims in Iran are unclear.

“Now, lot of people are saying, people who know better, what's the mission? Why are we acting now and so forth and so on?” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen, it's just appalling to hear Democrats and commentators and others make these statements when they know damn well what the mission is. We've faced this for 50 years.”

Levin subsequently asked Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “It's so important that we have this commander-in-chief when we have this commander-in-chief because literally none of this would be happening, would it?”

“Mark, I don't believe that presidents know when history is going to come knocking,” Goldberg replied. “It happens at times you can't expect. But what makes a great president is being willing to answer the call, not to shy away, not to cower, not to be deterred, as many past presidents have, and repeatedly throughout his two presidencies, when history knocks, President Trump answers the call, and that is what he just did.”

Goldberg went on to say of the war: “We are six days in, seven days in and this is moving at a pace no one could ever have imagined. We are decimating their missiles, their drones, their Navy, their ability to remake a nuclear weapons program, and soon, with the help of our allies in Israel, decapitating their ability to wage war against the Iranian people as well.”

“Understand what is at stake here for our national security. Donald Trump is delivering for the United States of America,” he concluded.

“Beautifully put, and conversely, the Democrats are trying to obstruct him every step of the way,” Levin replied.

The president was watching Levin and Goldberg wax poetic about how great he is.

“Rich Goldberg was GREAT on Mark Levin tonight,” Trump posted that night. “Two guys who really get it! Thank you both.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Shannon Bream Fox dignified transfer

Shouldn't Brendan Carr's FCC Launch An Immediate Probe Of Fox News?

Federal Communications Chairman Brendan Carr faces an important test of his stated standards for news organizations this week: If he's not just looking to punish media outlets for being insufficiently deferential to President Donald Trump, he must launch a news distortion investigation of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Broadcasting Co.

Trump attended a dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base on Saturday honoring the first six U.S. service members killed in the Iran war. The president drew criticism for wearing a baseball cap that his campaign store sells for $55 while saluting coffins bearing the remains of the fallen.

Fox News’ right-wing propagandists would lose their minds if a Democratic president did such a thing. But on Sunday morning, the network instead seemed to hide the president’s disrespect toward the dead. While purporting to cover the previous day’s event, Fox & Friends Weekend aired months-old footage from December of Trump attending a dignified transfer ceremony for two U.S. National Guard members and a civilian interpreter killed in Syria. The president was not wearing a ballcap in that footage, but was wearing an overcoat to shield him from the December cold.

Critics quickly exposed the Fox & Friends misrepresentation, and host Griff Jenkins apologized later in the program, claiming that the show “inadvertently aired video from an older dignified transfer instead of the ceremony that took place yesterday.” The network similarly stressed in a statement that it had been a mistake, saying, “FOX News Media programs inadvertently aired file footage from a previous dignified transfer while discussing yesterday’s ceremony at Dover Air Force Base. The archival footage was mistakenly used during the video sourcing process. We regret the error and apologize for the incorrect footage.”

But Fox News didn’t just air this incorrect footage once — as CNN noted on Sunday, “A quick scan showed both last night's ‘The Big Weekend Show’ and this morning's ‘Fox News Sunday’ also used the wrong footage, while last night's ‘My View with Lara Trump’ used the correct video.”

Fox News Sunday aired the footage of Trump at the December dignified transfer twice, first while anchor Shannon Bream said, “As fallen service members from Operation Epic Fury make their final return home, the Pentagon praises the progress being made on the battlefield,” and again as Bream stated: “On Saturday, the remains of the six U.S. service members killed in Operation Epic Fury came home. The president, first lady, and Vice President Vance joined family members for the dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force in Delaware.” During the second occurrence, on-screen text read, “DOVER, DE. Saturday.”

Fox News programming airs on cable, which means its content is largely unregulated — but Fox News Sunday also airs on hundreds of local broadcast stations across the country, which “are subject to certain speech restraints” overseen by the FCC. That body, under Carr’s leadership, has been much more aggressive in cracking down on broadcast networks over purported “news distortion” on the public airwaves — at least when those distortions are against the interests of the president.

Carr targeted CBS for purported “news distortion,” using his federal regulatory power to extract concessions from the network as its parent company Paramount sought to merge with Trump ally David Ellison’s Skydance Media.

Shortly after Trump took office and made him the FCC chair last year, Carr reopened a previously dismissed probe of CBS News over its editing of a 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris that aired in October 2024. Trump had sued CBS for $10 billion over the interview, and repeatedly declared that the network should “lose its license.”

Carr demanded an unedited transcript of the 60 Minutes interview and tied the investigation to the merger, saying, “I’m pretty confident that that news distortion complaint over the ’60 Minutes’ transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction.” The probe went away and the merger went through after Paramount agreed to settle Trump’s lawsuit and appoint a right-wing ombudsman.

CBS hasn’t been the only target of Carr’s ire. He also revived FCC probes into right-wing complaints that NBC favored Harris during the 2024 election because she appeared on Saturday Night Live, and that ABC’s moderator had unfairly fact-checked Trump during their presidential debate.

And when ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel inaccurately suggested in September that right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s killer was part of “the MAGA gang,” the chair rushed to a MAGA influencer’s show to accuse the comedian of “an intentional effort to mislead the American people” — and to threaten retribution against both ABC parent company Disney and the broadcast stations that aired Kimmel’s show, including potential “license revocation from the FCC.”

Broadcast licenses granted by the FCC give networks “a unique obligation to operate in the public interest,” Carr explained to Trumpist mouthpiece Sean Hannity during a Fox interview amid the Kimmel uproar.

Fox Broadcasting stations, one could argue, failed that “unique obligation to operate in the public interest” when they engaged in “news distortion” by airing inaccurate footage that prevented viewers from seeing the president disrespect deceased service members.

So how about it, Mr. Chairman? Why not launch a probe and demand interviews and documents to find out whether Fox’s editing issue was “inadvertent,” as they claim — or, as certainly seems possible given the network’s record, “an intentional effort to mislead the American people”?

Reprinted with permisson from Media Matters

MAGA Pundits: Trump Can Resolve Iran War Divide By Mass Deporting Muslims

MAGA Pundits: Trump Can Resolve Iran War Divide By Mass Deporting Muslims

Influential right-wing voices are seeking to bridge the divide in MAGA media over Donald Trump's war in Iran by urging the president to launch a new phase of mass deportations targeting American Muslims for denaturalization and removal.

Trump’s deployment of the U.S. military alongside Israeli forces in a massive series of strikes on Iranian targets is fracturing his MAGA media machine as commentators scramble to stake out opposing positions, bash those on the other side (if generally not the president himself), and seize audience share.

Fox’s Sean Hannity and Mark Levin and The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro are among the most outspoken supporters of the war, while Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Steve Bannon are some of its most vocal critics. The feud has become heated: On Tuesday, Kelly called Hannity a “supplicant to Donald Trump” (true) while Shapiro denounced Kelly as an “unbelievable coward” and Carlson as a conspiracy-obsessed antisemite (also true).

These splits in the MAGAsphere have become a frequent feature of the second Trump administration, with the coalition of right-wing extremists that supported his election fracturing over his handling of issues like the Russia-Ukraine war, tariffs, U.S. strikes on Iran, immigration enforcement and reforms, and, most of all, the Jeffrey Epstein case.

The right-wing media ecosystem is at its most politically potent when it is united, and Trump often tries to respond to these divisions by giving the feuding pundits a common enemy to attack instead. When portions of his base revolted over the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files last year, for example, he went so far as to dangle the arrest and imprisonment of former President Barack Obama over a nonsensical conspiracy theory.

Benny Johnson and Matt Walsh, both popular podcasters who are skeptical of the Iran war but support the president, are urging Trump to deploy a similar strategy now. They want the president to reunite his supporters by proposing something they can all agree with: The brutal use of state power to punish Muslim Americans, particularly those with left-wing views. Johnson and Walsh argue that such individuals must be repressed because they constitute “the enemy” and “a clear and present danger to the lives of American citizens.”

Benny Johnson: “It’s time for “mass deportations” and “mass denaturalizations” of Muslims

“Whatever you think about the Iran war, this moment should be the absolute and total initiation point for mass deportations, grand and mass deportations of every criminal alien, mass denaturalizations of everyone who gives aid and comfort to the enemy,” Johnson said on Tuesday.

“There is an enemy,” he continued. “There are ideologies that are incompatible with Western civilization. That is a matter of fact, and we should not want them inside of our lands. It doesn't mean that we need to go kill them in their lands, but we shouldn't want them in our lands.”

Johnson went on to describe Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) as “a walking billboard for what happens when you allow this to fester,” saying that her presence at the State of the Union as a Muslim immigrant from Somalia who criticizes the president was an “insult” that “should make all Americans demand mass deportations, and immediately.”


Matt Walsh: “You should be on board” with mass deportations and denaturalizations of Muslims

Walsh warned on his podcast the same day — which was titled “The Biggest Threat To Our Country Is Inside Our Border” — that “we can’t end up with a situation where we’re fighting Muslim terrorists overseas while hordes of anti-American Muslims continue to stream into the United States.”

“If you look at the history of Muslim migration to the United States and how quickly our demographics changed, you begin to realize how dire this problem is,” he explained. After highlighting the growth of the Muslim immigrant population alongside atrocities committed by individual foreign Muslims, Walsh concluded that “this is the culture that we’ve been importing.”

Walsh went on to suggest that “more likely, all of this migration is part of the larger effort to dilute the votes of American citizens by replacing us with foreigners who despise the United States,” adding, “The top priority of this administration should be to reverse this catastrophic and deliberate effort to fundamentally alter the demographics of this country.”

“This is the top national security threat we face, and it’s not even close,” Walsh said. “So even if you support the current war in Iran, you should be on board with this — every single one of these Third World foreigners is a clear and present danger to the lives of American citizens.”

Walsh went on to say that while mass deportations and denaturalizations could prove politically unpopular, ruinously expensive, or risky, such policies are no more so than the war Trump started in Iran.

Addressing Trump directly, he continued, “If we’re going to do something drastic and explosive and unpopular thousands of miles from home, why not do it here too? That’s the question that the base is asking. If we’re going to give a major prize to the donors and pundit class — people who have tried to undermine you every step of the way, people who oppose your domestic agenda, people who, many of them, want you to be impeached and in prison — if we’re going to reward them, then will we also reward your America First base?”

The pundit then laid out a series of steps to curtail legal immigration and deport immigrants, including urging the president to “strip citizenship from paper Americans who use the word ‘they’ when they describe our country.”

“Will you finish the thing you set out to achieve?” Walsh concluded. “Will you make America America great again?”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Behind War On Iran: The Fox News-White House Feedback Loop

Behind War On Iran: The Fox News-White House Feedback Loop

President Donald Trump, across both of his terms, has regularly shaped federal policy in response to the propaganda he hears from his sycophants at Fox News. But his decision over the weekend to launch a war of choice against Iran without a clear goal may prove to be the most consequential example of this feedback loop to date.

Trump is deeply immersed in the Fox universe. He famously consumes the network’s content; highlights particular segments that strike his fancy on social media; hires its employees to run his administration; consults its personalities for advice on domestic and foreign policy; and doles out contracts and pardons alike based on what he sees on its airwaves.

And for decades, the Fox stars Trump trusts most have consistently called for military strikes and regime change in Iran.

That campaign took on new urgency when Trump returned to the White House.

Last June, Fox personalities — particularly Trump loyalists Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Brian Kilmeade — used their programs to urge Trump to follow up on Israeli attacks on Iran by launching strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. They warned that Iran is, as Kilmeade put it, “our enemy,” that it posed an imminent threat to American citizens and that, in Levin’s words, “force” is the “only thing to stop” Iran.

Other MAGA media figures from non-Fox outlets opposed U.S. involvement in the conflict. But the overwhelmingly pro-war Fox coverage — and a White House meeting Levin had with the president — were apparently dispositive.

And after Trump ordered the U.S. military to attack three Iranian nuclear sites, Fox’s war hawks rewarded the president by showering him with praise for what Hannity said would “go down in history as one of the greatest military victories.”

The same pattern appears to be playing out eight months later, albeit on a much larger scale.

A Fox-fueled push for war with Iran

Over the past weeks, as U.S. military forces converged in the Middle East, the same Fox figures again urged Trump to attack. Notably, their argument was noticeably light on defining a goal for U.S. military operations after the bombs began to fall.

Instead, they argued that because Iran could, at some point in the future, pose a threat, Trump should act now while he is empowered to do so — and that the result would be an easy U.S. victory. “I cannot think of any reason not to take this regime out,” Levin argued. The U.S. would “lose credibility forever” without a strike, Kilmeade claimed. For Hannity, “The world is going to be better and safer.”

While some on the network seemed to shy away from the topic, criticism of potential strikes largely took place elsewhere in the MAGA media — outside of the Fox programming the president himself watches.

On Friday, hours before the attack began, the trio made their final pitch.

“I hope the president chooses to go at it,” Kilmeade said Friday morning. “We have been looking at these headlines for 47 years, and we have an opportunity to end it. And this president likes to make history.”

“This president knows right from wrong,” Levin told Hannity that night. “He knows good from evil. He knows that this regime is a death cult. And he knows that there's only really two countries that are prepared and willing to put an end to this.”

“We don't need to put up with their crap,” he concluded, as Hannity nodded along. “It's time to put it to an end.”

They got what they wanted: The U.S. and Israeli militaries began attacking Iranian targets that night. Since then, hundreds of Iranians have reportedly been killed, including Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Pentagon has reported the first U.S. casualties in the conflict. There is no end currently in sight — the Iranian government remains defiant, while the U.S. is sending more troops to the region.

The propaganda war has an aim. The real one doesn’t.

Trump, meanwhile, has had trouble articulating what he’s trying to accomplish.

He first suggested his aim was regime change when he urged the Iranian people to “take over” the government in his first public statement after the attack, but in interviews since then, he just seems to be riffing. He told The Washington Post he is seeking “freedom for the people” of Iran, but he bemoaned to ABC News that regime figures he expected to take over the country had also been killed in the initial strikes. Trump also stressed to The New York Times that his model was the U.S. attack on Venezuela, where the dictatorial regime remained in place after U.S. forces seized its leader. But he also suggested that the Iranian military could turn over its arms to its public. “They would really surrender to the people, if you think about it,” he explained.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox & Friends host, added to the incoherence of the administration’s message when he said at a Monday morning press conference, “This is not a so-called 'regime change war,' but the regime sure did change.” But the Iranian regime currently remains in place, and according to at least some of his statements, Trump may prefer it that way.

Perhaps the reason there doesn’t seem to be a clear goal for the U.S. bombing of Iran is because the goal, as laid out by Trump’s Fox propagandists, was for the U.S. to bomb Iran. That is the aim the likes of Kilmeade, Hannity, and Levin had in mind, and now that they’ve goaded Trump into following through, they are cheering him on.

“Donald Trump did what nobody else could do for half a century,” Levin marveled on Saturday. “How do you like that? And you know why he did it? Because he loves his country.”

So what happens next in Iran? That’s beyond the remit of Trump’s Fox Cabinet. Instead, they are gearing up for a propaganda war in which they declare Trump a world-historic victor and paint his critics as terrorists and traitors. For them, the details of what happens to the Iranians is for someone else to handle.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like anyone within the official Trump administration has answers either.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

How Fox's Mark Levin And Sean Hannity Promoted Case For War On Iran

How Fox's Mark Levin And Sean Hannity Promoted Case For War On Iran

Hours before the United States and Israeli militaries began bombing Iranian targets in an open-ended conflict with no clear goal, Fox News’ two biggest advocates for such strikes made the case for war.

Fox’s Sean Hannity and Mark Levin share close ties to President Donald Trump and a decades–old desire for regime change in Iran. Both encouraged the president to launch strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last year, and, as U.S. forces amassed in the Middle East in recent weeks, used their programs once again to urge him to attack. By contrast, others on the right are bitterly opposed to U.S. strikes on Iran, and several of their Fox colleagues have avoided talking about the prospect of war.

On Friday night, Levin went on Hannity’s program to weigh in on what was, at the time, an impending U.S. strike.

The Trump administration has largely avoided giving a detailed rationale for war, and Levin and Hannity sought to fill that void. The Fox hosts did not argue that Iran was an imminent threat to the United States or declare that the U.S. would bring freedom, democracy, and human rights to the Iranian people. Instead, they said that Iran’s government is evil; that it could, at some point decades from now, pose a threat; that the United States is capable of destroying that government at little cost; and thus, that it should do so.

Hannity began their discussion by mocking those who prefer negotiations to military strikes as “isolationists” who are “so naive and on a level so ignorant about the history of evil in the world."

The host then turned to Levin, who began by praising Trump as someone who “believes in peace” before warning: “If this Islamic Nazi terrorist mass killing regime gets a nuclear weapon, will they use it? The answer is yes."

The New York Times noted Thursday that the administration’s claims “that Iran has restarted its nuclear program, has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days, and is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States” are “false or unproven.” But Levin argued that the lack of an imminent threat should not stay the president’s hand, because future U.S. generations could be endangered if Iran were to obtain a nuclear weapon.

“This president knows right from wrong,” Levin claimed. “He knows good from evil. He knows that this regime is a death cult. And he knows that there's only really two countries that are prepared and willing to put an end to this. That's the United States of America and the state of Israel. And if we don't do it, it's not going to be done. And if we don't do it, our children and grandchildren are going to face thousands of ballistic missiles that can reach the continental United States, scores of nuclear warheads, chemical warheads, biological warheads."

“We don't need to put up with their crap,” he concluded. “It's time to put it to an end.”

Hannity replied by stressing that a U.S. war with Iran would be easy, with little threat to American service members.

“I think the Trump doctrine is perfect, especially in light of the next-generation weaponry that has evolved,” he said. “And I've always said that I think future wars are not going to be fought on a battlefield. They'll be fought from air-conditioned offices somewhere, you know, in a room."

“And what is so amazing about the Trump doctrine — no forever wars, no boots on the ground, we’ll have the latest, greatest, best technology available, military technology available,” Hannity added.

Hannity went on to suggest that Americans who oppose striking Iran are “ignorant” and would have allowed Adolf Hitler to seize Europe, claiming that “that's the same radical mindset that's in Iran."

“The isolationists brought us Hitler,” Levin agreed, concluding, “When you have a seventh-century barbaric, primitive terrorist mass murdering regime with 21st century technology and they're unwilling to get rid of it, you better take them out because they're going to take you out."

“Well said,” Hannity replied.

During a Fox & Friends victory lap this morning after the strikes started, Levin lauded Trump as a “great president” and a “great leader” who will be talked about “for decades and decades, if not centuries.”

Addressing critics of the war, Levin said, “The president did this for several reasons, and you have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to understand what they are. In other words, you have to be intentionally trying to undermine our troops and him."

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters


David Ellison

Turning America Into Hungary, Trump Forces Netflix To Drop Warner Bid

Another major media conglomerate teeters on the precipice of being absorbed by a deep-pocketed ally of President Donald Trump and his administration.

At the end of last week, Netflix had a signed deal to purchase the theatrical and streaming divisions of Warner Bros., with the company’s cable division — including CNN — set to be spun off into a separate company. Netflix had previously defeated a rival offer for all of Warner Bros. from Paramount, the media conglomerate owned by David Ellison, a Trump favorite and the son of the president’s buddy Larry Ellison, the billionaire.

Since then:

  • On Saturday, Trump demanded that Netflix fire board member Susan Rice or face “consequences” while promoting an ally’s statement that he should “kill” the Netflix-Warner Bros. deal. (The president’s propagandists on Fox News had spent the previous days trying to turn Rice’s involvement with the company into a scandal.)
  • On Monday, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos refused Trump’s demand, saying, “This is a business deal. It's not a political deal."
  • On Tuesday, Warner Bros. announced it was considering a new bid from Paramount, putting the Netflix deal in doubt.
  • On Wednesday, Politico reported that Sarandos had a White House meeting the next day to discuss Netflix’s bid.
  • On Thursday, Warner Bros. said that it now viewed the Paramount bid as superior; soon after, Netflix said it would not raise its bid, effectively ceding to Paramount.

The rival bids provide the shape of what Sarandos described as “a business deal,” and surely all parties will present it as such. But no one else needs to pretend to be so gullible.

Trump wanted Warner Bros. assets — particularly CNN, whose reporters he loathes — in the hands of an ally. His public statements and White House leaks made it crystal clear both that he preferred that Paramount purchase Warner Bros., and that his administration would corruptly wield its regulatory power to thwart rival bidders. And the strategy seems to have succeeded.

The result reeks of a “political deal” in which the president steered the ownership of a major news outlet to his crony. That’s unconscionable in a free society — but a familiar tactic of authoritarian leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who dismantled his country’s independent news media through such methods in service of his vision of “illiberal democracy,” which Trump seeks to emulate.

It’s working. In less than a year, CBS News and the massive social media platform TikTok, along with Paramount’s movie studios, have come under the thumb of a single family of pro-Trump billionaires. If the Warner Bros. purchase goes through, CNN, along with HBO and Warner’s movie business, will join them.

For CBS News, the Ellison takeover has involved new right-wing newsroom leaders who impose onerous reviews of critical reporting, veteran journalists leaving for greener pastures, layoffs, and an influx of MAGA-friendly hires. CNN can expect the same treatment — indeed, the White House and Larry Ellison have reportedly already discussed the potential firing of particular CNN hosts “whom Donald Trump is said to loathe, including Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar.”

The owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, seem to have been suborned and are disemboweling their institutions, while ABC News’ corporate owners have repeatedly capitulated to the administration.

We’ve warned for years that Trump intended to employ an authoritarian’s playbook against the media. That’s exactly what he’s done since returning to office. And now that he’s learned how easy it is to get corporate media owners to dance to his tune, it seems certain that he’ll soon find another target.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Trump and Ellison

Trump Escalates His Corrupt Scheme To Deliver CNN To Billionaire Ellison

President Donald Trump’s second term has been characterized thus far by America’s corporate leaders, including the owners of major media outlets, caving to his authoritarian threats of corrupt state retaliation. But with Trump’s public support cratering to levels not seen since he encouraged a mob of his supporters to sack the U.S. Capitol in 2021, the tide may be starting to turn.

Trump demanded in a Saturday social media post that Netflix “IMMEDIATELY” fire Susan Rice, who served in senior posts in the Obama and Biden administrations, from its board of directors — or face unnamed “consequences.” At issue were comments Rice made on a podcast last week about future accountability for corporations that violate the law on Trump’s behalf, which MAGA media figures denounced as a sign that “Democrats are out for blood” and plotting “retribution.”

Though the president did not detail the “consequences” Netflix would suffer for failing to bow to his whim, he was responding to an ally who urged him to “kill the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger now.” Trump actually cannot unilaterally cancel Netflix’s bid to take over Warner’s theatrical and streaming assets — but his administration can force it into expensive regulatory and court battles.

And Warner Bros. could, in turn, decide to pull out of their deal rather than face that scrutiny, leaving a potential acquisition open to rival bidder Paramount. That would surely be the preferred result for Trump, and could place Warner Bros.’ CNN subsidiary in the hands of Paramount’s owner David Ellison, a Trump supporter whose right-skewed stewardship of CBS News has drawn praise from the president. Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, a megabillionaire and Trump ally, has reportedly already discussed with the White House which CNN hosts could be fired under their leadership.

But Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, thus far, has refused to cave to Trump’s pressure. “This is a business deal. It's not a political deal," he told the BBC on Monday. “This deal is run by the Department of Justice in the U.S. and regulators throughout Europe and around the world.”

Sarandos defended the merger on its merits and minimized the import of the president’s comments, saying, “He likes to do a lot of things on social media.”

While Sarandos could still reverse himself and capitulate to Trump — or Warner Bros. could fold and switch to Paramount’s bid — the Netflix head’s public comments nonetheless stand out when compared to the behavior of media moguls like Jeff Bezos or Bob Iger. As we learned in Trump’s first term, corporate media leaders can defeat Trump’s authoritarian tactics — but only if they are willing to stand up to him.

How the right-wing freakout over Susan Rice’s remarks reached Trump

Rice, in a Thursday interview, pilloried law firms, media outlets, corporations, and others that have decided to act “in their perceived very narrow self-interest” to “take a knee” for Trump during his second term. She repeatedly warned that if those entities violated the law, they would be “held accountable” when Democrats come back into power.

“If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to, you know, play by the old rules, and say, ‘Oh, never mind, we’ll forgive you for all the people you fired, all the policies and principles you’ve violated, all, you know, the laws you’ve skirted,’ I think they’ve got another thing coming,” she told former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.

“You know, companies already are starting to hear they better preserve their documents,” she added. “They better be ready for subpoenas. If they’ve done something wrong, they’ll be held accountable, and if they haven’t broken the law, good for them.”

Right-wing media figures quickly seized on Rice’s comments, downplaying or ignoring the portions of her remarks in which she made clear that she was referring to entities that had broken the law in order to portray her as committing the Democrats to a campaign of retribution.

“Democrats are out for blood,” Fox News host Jesse Watters said Friday on The Five. “Former Obama lackey, Susan Rice, making it clear they want scalps if the Democrats take back power in the Midterms.

His co-host, Greg Gutfeld, added that what Rice was “saying is we'll destroy you when we come back unless you are obedient to us and do not play along,” adding that her remarks were “very anti-American.”

Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy, the wife of Transportation Secretary and former Fox host Sean Duffy, interviewed Fox host Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, about Rice’s comments Saturday morning.

“Lara, I mean, they are vindictive,” Campos-Duffy began. “They are mad that anyone would dare to work with President Trump in his administration, and basically they're saying paybacks are a you-know-what.”

Lara Trump, with a smirk, described Rice’s comments as “straight out of the authoritarian playbook” to “intimidate and threaten your political opponents.”

“It’s just so amazing to see that these people are the ones who call President Trump a fascist. That is the behavior they’re displaying with this sort of thing,” she later added. “And don’t forget, President Trump always said, he said during the campaign and you’ve seen it as proof when he’s now been back in office, ‘My revenge will be success, success for this country.’ What a great statement, and maybe the Democrats want to pay attention to that.”

In reality, Reuters documented “at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets” in a November report. More than a dozen of Trump’s political adversaries have faced criminal investigations, with prosecutors seeking federal charges in many of those cases. Trump himself has personally ordered such prosecutions, and has replaced prosecutors who refused to file the charges he has demanded.

Later on Saturday, Laura Loomer, a deranged bigot who wields a disturbing amount of influence over the president and his administration, weighed in — and tied Rice’s remarks back to Netflix and its bid for Warner Bros.

“Does Netflix stand by their Board Member threatening half of the country with weaponized government and political retribution for choosing who they wanted to vote for as President?” she asked. “This is as anti-American as it gets, and Netflix is proving everyday they are an anti-American, WOKE company.”

Loomer added that Rice’s remarks are “more horrifying” because “if the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger is approved, positive messaging of the Democrats' upcoming witch hunts against Trump … would likely be blasted across all streaming services.”

“President Trump @POTUS must kill the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger now,” she concluded, adding the handle of Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr.

Loomer’s diatribe drew support from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which oversees the FCC. He wrote of Rice’s comments: “Does @netflix stand by their board member threatening punishment & persecution for half of America that dares to disagree with her?”

By the evening, Trump had signed on to Loomer’s rant.

Truth Social post

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters