The Bulwark Podcast - Matt Gertz: Tucker's Trump Derangement Syndrome

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Tucker has been dining out on how much the media supposedly despises Donald Trump — when by his own admission, he hates Trump with a passion. And his take on Jan 6 is inherently contradictory: It was Nancy's fault, but also not much happened that day. Matt Gertz joins Charlie Sykes today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is March 8th, 2023. And as I wrote in my newsletter this morning, oh my, the planets of bullshit have aligned marvelously, haven't they? We got these Tucker Carlson texts to another producer at Fox News on January 4th, 2021. You've heard about this, I know. We are very, very close, he wrote, to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly cannot wait. I hate him passionately. And wait, there's more.

He also wrote, that's the last four years. We're all pretending we've got a lot to show for it because admitting what a disaster it's been is too tough to digest. But come on, there isn't really an upside to Trump. That's also Tucker, January 4th, 2021. So we have all of this happening at once. We got another juicy document drop from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News. And then, of course, Tucker Carlson, in partnership with his poodle, Kevin McCarthy, continues his attempt to retcon the attack on the Capitol. Let's start there, because in case you missed this, on Monday night, he began his campaign of revisionist history, which I will spoiler alert,

it's not going well. But this was Tucker Carlson cherry picking some of the 40,000 hours of video that he got from Kevin McCarthy to say that that insurrection that you all saw with your eyes wasn't really an insurrection at all. Here he is. A small percentage of them were hooligans. They committed vandalism. You've seen their pictures again and again. But the overwhelming majority weren't. They were peaceful.

They were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers. Footage from inside the Capitol overturns the story you've heard about January 6th. Protesters queue up in neat little lines. They give each other tours outside the Speaker's office. They take cheerful selfies and they smile. They're not destroying the Capitol. They obviously revere the Capitol. Meek. They were meek. Could we just interrupt this for a quick reality check? This was from the January 6th committee audio from that day. We need an area for the House members.

They're all walking over now through the tunnels. We're trying to hold the upper deck. We're trying to hold the upper deck now We're trying to hold the upper deck now. We need to hold the doors of the counter. We lost the line. We lost the line. What's interesting is the reaction to this. Even Republicans, especially Republicans in the Senate, are anxious to distance themselves from what Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson are putting out there. Here's a little quick montage of Republican senators

reacting to what Fox News is trying to do here. I think it's bullshit. I was here. I was down there and I saw maybe a few tourists, a few people who got caught up in things. But when you see police barricades breached, when you see police officers assaulted, all of that, or you had to be in close proximity to it. I just don't think it's helpful. All I know is that there were a lot of people in the Capitol at the time who I think were scared for their lives. So you can, you know, however you want to describe it, but it was an attack on the Capitol. I think that breaking through glass windows and doors to get into the

United States Capitol against the orders of police is a crime. The point is what happened that day shouldn't have happened. Clearly the chief of the Capitol Police in my view correctly describes what most of us witnessed firsthand on January 6th. So that's my reaction to it. It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that's completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at Capitol thinks. So the timing for today's podcast could not be better. We are joined by Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, who has been studying Fox News and the right-wing outlets in its orbit for 15 years. So first of all, good morning, Matt. Good morning. You've done this for 15 years and

you have not lost your mind yet. Well, I mean, different people may have different opinions on that, but I can put up a good front at least. It's hard to know where to even begin this morning, but let's start here. You know, it's one thing to talk about, you know, the fire hose of lies and hypocrisy from Tucker Carlson, but this story is also about Kevin McCarthy and the role he's playing in giving up all of these tapes to Carlson and to Fox News. So give me your take on this. What's going on here? I mean, as you wrote, I mean, if McCarthy actually thought, you know, turning over 40,000 hours of security footage was, you know, all about transparency, he might have given them to the press and public. So why did he give them to Tucker Carlson? And what does that say about Kevin McCarthy?

Well, he gave them to Tucker Carlson because he knows that Tucker Carlson has been spending the last couple of years spinning up this alternate narrative about January 6th is that there were some old people from unfashionable zip codes who waltzed into the Capitol and they wandered through it and they were basically having a tour. And that after the fact, the media, Democrats jumped on it in order to basically create political prisoners out of these poor victims, and that you at home, the viewer, are next. This is not like some sort of secret. This is not a hidden message in Carlson's work. You know, he did this big multi-part series called Patriot Purge. And after that, you saw a couple of Fox personalities leave the network about January 6th. Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. This was 2021. Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, yes. Chris Wallace left later that same year. And so this was a big to-do. McCarthy knows what Tucker Carlson would do with this footage. He gave it to him for that reason, to produce this propaganda. And now, you know, you played those Republican senators criticizing Carlson, but McCarthy thinks all of this is fine. He is quite happy with how things are going. He wouldn't have done it any other way because Carlson did exactly what he expected him to do. So you also point out, though, that this gift of footage was part of Tucker's demands when

McCarthy was trying to lock down the votes to become speaker, right? I mean, back on January 3rd, Tucker was ripping McCarthy, said he shouldn't be allowed to become speaker until he agreed to release all the footage from January 6th. And among the many surrenders and cave-ins that Kevin McCarthy performed at that time, that was one of them, right? I mean, sort of an indication of who holds the whip hand and, you know, who's who's bitch. Absolutely. While McCarthy was trying to find the votes that he needed to become speaker, most of Fox was basically rallying behind him and saying these Republicans who are standing this way should just get on board. But Carlson was different. Carlson said that McCarthy should make a deal with the Republicans who were unwilling to support him.

Specifically, he wanted all of the footage from January 6th released to reveal the lies that he claimed had been told about that day. And he wanted the House to have a committee on the weaponization of the federal government that he claimed had occurred over the last several years. He got both of them and, in fact, got special personal access for his team to the footage trove as part of the deal. So you said before that Kevin McCarthy is, you know, perfectly happy with all of this. Are you sure about that? Because it clearly he, I mean, I won't say reluctantly, but I mean, this wasn't his idea. I mean, he looks silly at the moment, doesn't he? I mean, you even have Mitch McConnell, you know, standing up there holding the letter from the chief of the Capitol Police saying, you know, what a complete goat rope this all is and saying that, you know, Fox made a terrible mistake. So why is he happy? Doesn't

understand that hugging January 6th so closely is perhaps not on message and also provides an opportunity for us to remember all the things that he said back then and contrast it to the game he's playing right now? He's happy even though he looks like a complete freaking hypocrite? Or are these people just sociopaths? Do they not care? I think he looks like a fool and a hypocrite to people like us who remember the comments that he made about January 6th in the immediate aftermath and who recognize what actually happened to that day. But I don't think rational actors are who he's playing to.

He's playing to the Republican base, the people that Tucker Carlson holds in the palm of his hand and he wants their support, wants them on board, wants them to stop criticizing him. You know, Carlson has had a lot of nice things to say about Kevin McCarthy in the wake of being granted access to this footage. Getting Carlson off his back may be worth, you know. It's worth it. Yeah.

I think that's the right calculation. I wanted to drill down a little bit on this. Why is this happening? And I have several different layers to this question. Why is Fox News doing this now when they are faced with a billion dollar plus lawsuit for their lies about the election the week after we had this incredible embarrassment of riches from the document dump, from showing the text messages and the emails, the hypocrisy, the duplicity, the dishonesty. Why is Tucker Carlson

doubling down on this? And why is Fox News letting him? So I think that these two things are not really inconsistent. If you look at these text messages, what they reveal is that people like Tucker Carlson are willing to spread things that they personally believe are untrue, because they know that that is what their viewers want to hear. What I think is the key text message from all of these dumps is Tucker Carlson telling Laura Ingram that he personally found the lies from Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani unbelievably offensive, but quote, our viewers are good people and they believe it. I think that is the key that unlocks Tucker Carlson's show and a lot of the rest of Fox News. They are not in the business of informing their viewers.

They are not in the business of teaching their viewers. They are in the business of telling their viewers what they believe is correct. And what Tucker Carlson's viewers believe is correct, in part because they're inclined to believe this in the first place, in part because Tucker keeps telling them that, is that the January 6th attempted coup and insurrection was no big deal. And that, if anything, it is an attempt to attack them personally. And so that is what he is serving up to them. Well, I mean, obviously, though, that they are faced with some legal peril. And there are people in Fox News who are very, very concerned about this. I mean, there are the Murdochs. What do you make of the fact that Brett Baier aired a segment yesterday in which he called into question Tucker's reporting and actually aired the Republican senators saying what a terrible mistake is? I mean, is there kind of an operation cover your

ass going on now at Fox? Is there a division about this? How is this playing out internally? So there's always been, I think, a bit of a divide at Fox News between the news side and the opinion side on how to handle stories like this. You can see in coverage from Brett Baier of January 6th, the good amount of pushing particular Republican narratives about, you know, whether Nancy Pelosi did a good enough job of ensuring security and so on and so forth. But they really do not typically go to this extent of diving into the fever swamp. Back to this question of why is this happening now? Why does Tucker Carlson feel the need to whitewash and to retcon January 6th?

What is the motivation here? You would think that Republicans, conservatives, you know, even Trumpists would want to talk about something else. So why does Tucker Carlson think that it's so important in March of 2023 to go back and relive and relitigate January 6th? Does he feel that it's necessary to do this in order to rehabilitate Donald Trump? Is it about discrediting Democrats? What is the reason why he is so focused on this particular issue at this time as opposed to moving on? I think it's about setting himself up as the true defender of right

wing people, like the people who watch him on TV, he is establishing that he is willing to defend the patriots who have been subject to political persecution, and that he is willing to do so while Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell are willing to abandon them. I don't really think it's about rehabilitating Trump, though that is in fact what it does, right? I mean, one of the major strikes against Donald Trump is he tried to subvert the election and institute a coup, and it led to the storming of the US Capitol by his supporters. That is a bad thing. Some people think that's bad, right? Some people think that might be an issue.

You won't hear that from Donald Trump, certainly. You won't hear that from any other serious candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. That entire debate has been stamped out by people like Carlson telling their viewers night after night that there's nothing to see here. All right, let's talk about these document dumps and all the things that we've been seeing i'm guessing you have had no sleep over the last week just reading through all the text messages and everything but you've been writing about and covering fox news for 15 years so i'm really interested to get your perspective what have we learned in the last week that we didn't know before or what has it confirmed what is new new to you? What did you go,

shit, you know, I never thought I'd read this. Anything? Or does this confirm everything you thought? I think it is remarkable to see things that sound perfectly normal coming from a media matters senior fellow coming from Rupert Murdoch. It's quite typical for me to look at Fox's coverage and say, oh, this is Republican propaganda. They're trying to get particular Senate candidates elected to office. It's horribly unethical and corrupt and not something that normal news outlets do, but that's clearly what's happening there. It's very different to look at an email from Rupert Murdoch in which he tells Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, we should concentrate on Georgia helping any way we can

with regard to the runoff elections that were happening in 2020, 2021. Did you run around the office or run around the house saying, they put it in fucking writing. I cannot believe it. Look, it's right here. It's right here in black and white. That is very much what was happening as I was reading these emails. The other one that just knocked me down similarly is Rupert Murdoch again to Suzanne Scott.

We cannot lose the Senate if at all possible. We? Really? You wrote that down in an email? I did not see that coming. There are so many dazzling details that get lost in all this because there's just so much, you know, including the fact that Rupert Murdoch was giving, you know, valuable internal data and information and tips to Jared Kushner about the debates, about the Biden campaign's ad buys.

That's just pretty remarkable stuff, Matt. I mean, just objectively speaking. I think that's correct. And, you know, Media Matters has filed a complaint with the FEC to look into those particular details because it sure seems like Rupert Murdoch was giving internal information that he knew about because of his job at Fox News to the Trump campaign in order to help that campaign get elected. And that would be illegal corporate spending. There's quite a lot here. The incidental details, you know, stuff like the Fox primetime hosts clearly despising their news

side colleagues and at times trying to get them fired for telling the truth is remarkable as well. Problematic. A little bit, yeah. But I mean, the broad contours, I would say, are things that I've been saying for the last decade plus, that Fox News is willing to lie to its viewers on a grand scale in order to make money and amass power, that they deliberately act to sway particular elections, knowingly that they are a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party rather than a legitimate news outlet. Now there's just so much more evidence coming from people inside Fox News to back it up. So what is the greater existential threat? If there is an existential

threat, what is the greater threat to Fox News right now? This lawsuit, the $1.6 billion lawsuit, and maybe more to come, or the loss of their audience if they're not perceived to be sufficiently Trump-MAGA friendly? I mean, they're kind of caught between a rock and a hard place there. Which is the greater threat to them? Because they're obsessed about both of them. I think the Dominion lawsuit is actually providing a lot of grist that other right-wing outlets that want to snag some of Fox's market share are likely to take advantage of. You mentioned the newest filing, which features Tucker Carlson talking about how much he hates Donald Trump. That is a remarkable document, given his own show over the last several years. Certainly,

Tucker Carlson's audience members do not expect him to be someone with what appears to be a fairly advanced case of Trump derangement syndrome. Will they though? If someone like Newsmax or OAN, that has been a tactic that the other Fox competitors have taken repeatedly over the last several years. It was what Fox executives were so terrified about in November of 2020 that they saw that Newsmax was snagging their market share, and they were doing so in part by openly attacking Fox News with a lift from Donald Trump. And I think we're seeing some of the same things come to pass with these Dominion filings, Trump lashing out at Rupert Murdoch and others at Fox on his Truth Social platform, and some of the competitors sort of dabbling into covering

that story. So let's talk about this text that you mentioned that we led off with. Tucker Carlson saying that we are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can't wait. I hate him passionately. And there have been a series of this is not just a one off where he talks about, you know, what a menace he is and everything. So I know it's dangerous to try to get into the mind of Tucker Carlson. But some of these hosts, including Tucker, obviously, despise Trump, hate Trump, fear Trump, and yet continue to shill for him. Here is a quote that my colleague Eric Hananoki found last night after reading that email. Reporters hate Trump with an all-consuming mania. They hate him so intensely that at times it's been amusing to watch. That's Tucker Carlson, October 30th, 2020. So he and his entire network have been dining out for years on how much the media despises Donald Trump and propping Donald Trump up as a hero for standing against the fake news media. And they themselves, in the case of Tucker Carlson, hate Donald Trump by their own admission. It's fascinating stuff.

And also, you know, you wrote about this in a piece for MSNBC that it ultimately doesn't matter what the Fox stars believe, it matters what they say. And these text messages show that Tucker Carlson and the other hosts deceive their own viewers because they think that's what the viewers want. And that's the kind of the subtext here is they really despise, they have contempt for their own viewers and feel that the viewers want to be lied to and can be lied to and that they won't pay a price for it. So let me ask you this, though. You know, I asked before, what is the greatest existential threat, the lawsuit or the loss of viewership? Or is there no existential threat? Is Fox going to simply barrel through this, you know, listening to Tucker Carlson? I'm thinking I'm looking at a guy who thinks there are going to be no consequences for this, that he's going to come out the other side just fine because they have in the past that the audience will swallow this as it has swallowed so many other things in the past. What do you think? I think it depends on if the audience

ever finds out about it at all. I mean, the audience for Tucker Carlson's show is not reading the New York Times, the Washington Post. They're not getting information about this from CNN or from this podcast. They are firmly ensconced within a right-wing media bubble that is effectively seamless and subject to the members of that right-wing media having told them for decades that they cannot trust mainstream news outlets. So the key thing is whether there are enough cracks in that right-wing media information bubble, whether there are enough critics who feel like they can snag some market share from Fox by trumpeting this stuff to really let them know what's happening here? That I think is the real question. I don't know the answer to it. I think we're seeing some movement on that front so far, some coverage from

outlets like Newsmax. I think there was a National Review piece. There's a little bit. Trump himself, Steve Bannon was hammering away at him. I mean, Steve Bannon is just on a complete jihad against the Murdochs and Fox News right now. That's right. And he has a lot of influence with a big chunk of that Fox News audience. So I think we have to see how that develops before we'll know for sure. I'm looking at some of your coverage because you've been going through this in great detail. And you write looking at what Tucker is putting out. Honestly, while the purpose is obviously grotesque, the Tucker Carlson show's actual output here has been pretty pathetic. And then you have his gloss on what the footage showed. His team had weeks with 41,000 hours of security tape.

And it is kind of lame what they came up with. It is in many ways very underwhelming to think that with 41,000 hours, you just come up with a couple of these cherry pick scenes. And that's why I think he's being widely mocked by fact checkers and other non-magified viewers as well. Just talk to me about that a little bit, how underwhelming it is. So the most important thing about these performances is the conclusion, right? And the conclusion has been set up in advance. No one, I think, certainly not Kevin McCarthy, imagined that Tucker Carlson was going to gain access to all this footage and come out of it and say, oh man, you know, I was really wrong. This really was an insurrection. There really was a lot of violence and police officers getting assaulted and it's a disaster.

Now I need to apologize to my viewers for misleading them. That was never in their cards. He was always going to conclude, huge cover up, January 6th was no big deal, really, that the Democrats in the media are out to get you. That was all going to happen no matter what. But yeah, I've been really surprised at how pathetic the actual output has been here. I mean, they had a couple of weeks with 40,000 hours of tape. And what they come up with is like, okay, there are scenes like the ones you've previously seen of people who have breached the Capitol and are walking through it without breaking anything. I mean, okay. It kind of seems like he's demanding the answer from Mrs. Lincoln. You know, other than that, how was the play? Why won't Mrs. Lincoln tell us whether the play was good? I mean, the sort of key facts here are all of the law enforcement officers getting assaulted

and Congress going into hiding rather than carrying out their constitutional duty to count electoral votes. You know, that was kind of the big deal here. But, you know, Tucker Carlson doesn't want to talk about that. So he's talking about how, you know, one particular officer was not beaten to death because you can see him walking around afterwards, Sicknick, and we're not going to mention that he was also sprayed in the face with pepper spray and that he died the next day of a stroke that the medical examiner said was related to what had happened. We're just going to pretend that what our video shows here. And his family has put out a scathing statement on all of that. It is interesting, though,

that Tucker in some ways has become a parody of one of the right's favorite media memes from 2020. Remember the CNN reporter who was standing in Kenosha, Wisconsin, you know, talking about the fiery but mostly peaceful protest with this big fire behind him? Nothing to see here. Tucker Carlson, mostly peaceful. Okay, so you also have written about night two of Carlson's propaganda campaign. And there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance going on, right? That he's arguing at the same time, you know, this was just a crowd of sightseers meekly walking around the Capitol while simultaneously trying to argue that the Capitol police were shamefully unprepared for that day. So which is it? Right. Which is it? We were shamefully unprepared for this terrible thing happening, which didn't happen because

here's all my images of these sightseeing tourists meekly walking through the Capitol. Yeah, it really doesn't make any sense at all. There have always been two lines of critique around January 6th from the right. You have some people trying to make it a story about Nancy Pelosi, saying Nancy Pelosi should have ensured that the Capitol was better defended that day, that there was more Capitol police ready for these protesters. But that argument only works if you accept that there was actually a lot of violence on January 6th. If you don't do that, if you use the second argument, which is, this has all been overblown, there wasn't really that much violence,

it was probably fed agitators who started it, whatever there was, those two arguments do not match up. But he's trying to do both. So night one is all about how there was very little violence. There was some vandalism by a small minority of the people that were there that day. And night two is him claiming that the Capitol Police was unprepared, showing video of someone who was involved in defense that day, saying that they hadn't been ready for what happened. But he can't say what the consequences were. He says they had to deal with the crowd milling around the Capitol building. I guess we dodged a bullet on January 6th that that crowd had been more violent. A lot of law enforcement could have been assaulted and we might have had a near breakdown of American democracy. But luckily, they were mostly just meek and, you know, nonviolent and milling around.

And so everything was fine, I guess. hitting crisis levels after the 2020 election, sort of pitting the primetime hosts against the news side. And, you know, Laura Ingraham saying we are officially working for an organization that hates us. Reporters said they were being punished simply for doing their jobs. One producer told colleagues he was quitting because he couldn't justify working for Fox anymore. You commented, though, that you thought that the prime timers, the Laura Ingrams, have the stronger side of the argument here. What do you mean? I mean that they have a correct analysis of what Fox News is and what it is there for. It is a propaganda machine. It takes in money and power because it lies to its viewers. And they recognize that. and the news side people who think that it is something

other than that are really deluding themselves they are cogs in this propaganda machine they are there because fox needs to have some shows that look vaguely like a normal news product in order to attract advertisers because advertisers don't want to be associated with a pure propaganda channel. They're window dressing. And I think the Fox hosts understand that. And the news side people who think otherwise should re-examine some of their life choices. The place where I think the Fox primetimers have it wrong is they think that they are indispensable. What comes across in these text messages is them saying, you know, we have a lot of power here, we should use it.

And to some extent, I think they have. I think the news side has definitely lost a bunch of ground since the election. But the Fox lineup, even in prime time, is not indispensable. It is replaceable. Bill O'Reilly was the king of cable news for a decade plus, and now he has a podcast and a show on something that's called The First, which I don't really know what that is, and no one else does either. He does not have a personal audience. He had an audience by virtue of the fact that he had the 8pm show on Fox News. If Fox got rid of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram, and replaced them with Pete Hegseth and

Dan Bongino and Maria Bartiromo, they would be fine. The audience would still be there as long as those hosts were still putting out the radical red meat that they have come to expect from Fox News. But they're all cogs. They're replaceable. They are not indispensable. So let's talk about Brett Baer on the news side. He had a very bad week last week with the revelation of those emails suggesting that he thought that Fox's call that Biden had won Arizona was wrong and we should put it back in Trump's column. There's a little bit of pushback to people who are defending him. There's been a release of the full email. So where are we at on Brett Baier? How much of Brett Baer's journalistic cred

has survived, do you think? I mean, I hope that Brett Baer doesn't really have that much journalistic cred at this point at all, but the email is not good. So this is Thursday, November 5th, 2020. Fox News has called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden. It is the out again in the filing last week. And now we have the full email, and it looks just terrible for Red Bear. The email, it's to Bill Salmon, the longtime Washington bureau chief, and Chris Starwalt, who was at the time the politics editor and was involved, both of them were deeply involved in the call, and Jay Wallace, who's president of Fox News. And the email is, I know you guys are feeling the pressure, but the situation is getting uncomfortable, really uncomfortable. I keep having to defend this on air and ask questions about it. And it

seems we are holding on for pride. I know the confidence you say you had and the numbers, but it's at least within the realm of possible that he, meaning Trump, closes the gap now and it's hurting us. The sooner we pull it, even if it gives us major egg, egg on our face, and we put it back in his column, the better we are, in my opinion. And he's passing on an email from a viewer who is criticizing the Arizona call. I'm not defending Bear, but let me just push back on what his defenders will say. So he passes on that viewer from an email who said, so in the last vote ads, the latest votes that are coming in in Arizona last night, Trump got 59%. The campaign is saying they will get 60% of the outstanding ballots yet

to be counted. And if they only get 57% of these outstanding ballots, they will win Arizona. So he's saying the 60,000 plus votes that came in overnight are trending very heavily for Trump. Maybe you guys got it wrong. So could you make the case that Brett Baier is actually looking at the data and expressing concern that maybe they have gotten it wrong? And, you know, it turned out that Arizona was relatively close. So was he actually doing due diligence or was he just trying to suck up to viewer sentiment? How do you read this? him saying we're getting a lot of criticism. And so we should respond to that criticism by reversing our call and putting it back in Trump's column. You know, he never led in state. That seems pretty bad. The other part of this, though, is when it first came out that this had

happened, Fox released a statement from Brett Baier about this. And he claimed in the statement that in the full email, which was not released in the book, he noted that I fully supported our decision desk's call and would defend it on air. I don't see anything in that email about supporting the call. And he's not saying he's defending it. He says, I keep on having to defend this on air. He's complaining about it and trying to make it into something else. That, I think, is not good for Mr. Baer. I've spent a lot of time talking to and about Paul Ryan about his role on the board of the Fox Corporation. And he's willing to say that he disagrees with Tucker Carlson, but I think he's absolutely convinced that he's more effective being in the room.

One of the things we learned, I think, from that Dominion document dump was how active he was in emailing back and forth with top executives. He clearly had Rupert Murdoch's ear, Lachlan Murdoch's ear. He thinks that he can influence it. And yet, in retrospect, here we are sitting here, March 8th, and Fox News is continuing to spew conspiracy theories and lies about the election. They are continuing to put out disinformation on the vaccine. So what is your take on Ryan? It's interesting that Donald Trump down in Mar-a-Lago keeps throwing bombs saying that it's all because of Paul Ryan, that Paul Ryan is pulling the strings. It seems pretty obvious to me that Paul Ryan is not pulling the strings and that the strings he's pulling aren't necessarily attached to anything. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think he seems pretty impotent in these documents, that he doesn't really seem to have too much influence over the network and seems to have

a bit of a misconception about, again, what its role is, which is stirring up the base and lying to them and in so creating voters for the Republican Party. But I mean, you know, I think I can do more to influence it from the inside is the same thing that every person at Fox who catches a large paycheck from Rupert Murdoch, in spite of the fact that they believe that Fox's lineup tells a lot of lies is doing. I mean, that's what Brett Baer is doing. That's what Shep Smith was doing and Chris Wallace were doing before they finally decided that they had seen too much. Someone like Shep Smith would, when asked about Fox News and why he was still there, would say, well, you know, if I leave, what's going to

replace me? It's going to be worse. He's not wrong. He's not wrong. He was not. He was not wrong about that because, you know, the people that are willing to stay are always going to have a higher tolerance for the crazy than the people that leave. But it is very much going on then. So in passing, we've mentioned Fox's vaccine coverage. You have written that, in fact, Fox's vaccine coverage has gotten worse, that in a recent analysis, 78% of the network's vaccine segments between January 1st and February 25th of this year undermined vaccines. So all of these things continue. Tucker Carlson continues to push the great replacement theory. You continue to have those kinds of memes. You continue to have the election lies. And they're going on with vaccine denialism in a pretty big way. So tell me how bad that has gotten or continues to be. In my 15 years of doing this, there has been nothing that has made me more

dispirited, I think, than watching Fox News turn against the COVID-19 vaccines. It's been really depressing to see on such a grand scale. I mean, we're talking about vaccines that are effectively miracles, that the world to get vaccinated against COVID-19. All the way back in December of 2020, he got the shot and praised it afterwards and said that other people should get it too. And as I said, there's this right wing bubble that Fox is such a major part of that has convinced its viewers that all media outlets outside of that bubble can't be trusted, I think that gives Fox a unique moral responsibility in a public health crisis and around vaccination to try to keep their viewers from dying. And they just haven't seen it that way. Since even before the vaccines were available, Tucker Carlson started attacking them and the attacks got worse, spread throughout the network and have

remained. I mean, we've been following Fox's anti-vax stance since the vaccine was released. And we do these big studies to try to nail down to a greater extent, the contours of this coverage. And so we looked at six weeks in the summer of 2021, we found that 59% of Fox's vaccine segments undermined vaccination. And now, you know, we looked at eight weeks from the beginning of this year, it's 78% undermined. 78%. Yeah. If you watch a segment about vaccines on Fox News right now, it's going to tell you that vaccines are bad in some way. And it might tell you that they're going to kill you.

And this was not inevitable, was it? I mean, you could have imagined an alternative reality in which, you know, the vaccines were the greatest triumph of the Trump administration. I'm not saying this, but I mean, you could, you know, Trump could have said, you know, it was my Operation Warp Speed that brought the vaccines. I should get credit for the vaccines. Instead, they decided to turn anti-vaccine. And of course, now Trump is obviously not going to tout his role in developing the vaccine. So, or was this inevitable? Is this like baked into it? Or is this a choice by Fox? I think it's a choice. I think it did not have to be this way. I think you could have had a scenario where Rupert Murdoch's initial line that

the vaccines are good, and I have personally taken them became, you know, a mantra of the whole network. You could have had Steve Doocy getting his a mantra of the whole network. You could have had Steve Doocy getting his shot live on Fox and Friends. You could have had the Fox primetime hosts rallying behind the vaccine because it's in the interests of their viewers who are overwhelmingly older and in the most danger from COVID-19, but they didn't care. It's more important, apparently, to give the viewers what they want to hear, confirm the stuff that they're seeing on Facebook about how dangerous the vaccines are than to try to give them information that can literally save their lives. So no, it didn't have to be this way. It was a choice they made.

Matt Gertz is a senior fellow at Media Matters. And Matt should not be confused with the Florida congressman, Matt Gaetz. That doesn't happen anymore, Matt? Not as much as it used to, though. Mainly, now it's Republicans who think that I'm him, which is a whole different story. I always love your Twitter threads when Matt Gaetz would be in the news and you would go, okay, there go my mentions. I'm not that guy. It's G-E-R-T-Z of all the people in the world to be confused with. Do not confuse, folks, do not confuse Matthew Gertz with Matt Gaetz. Matthew Gertz is senior Fellow at Media Matters,

who's been studying Fox News and right-wing news outlets for 15 years. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Thank you for having me. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again. the bulwark podcast is produced by katie cooper and engineered and edited by jason brown