The Daily Beast Podcast - Fox News Buried Its Own Mike Pence Story to Benefit Trump

Episode Date: March 24, 2024

Matt Gertz from Media Matters for America tells The New Abnormal that Fox News’ handling of its exclusive Mike Pence story shows how it's become a “Trumpian propaganda outlet.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears.

Welcome to another bonus episode of The New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Last week, Mike Pence openly stated that he would not endorse Donald Trump on Fox News, and then everyone except Fox News talked about it. Here to talk about Fox News's dissent into full-on-Trump propaganda is Media Matters for America's senior fellow Matt Gertz. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips.

So the Republicans had a very pathetic hearing to impeach Joe Biden. In fact, many people are saying this was the most pathetic hearing, which is really saying something. Anyway, here we have Representative Maxwell Frost interviewing previous guests to this podcast, Lev Parnas, who let loose many blockbuster details of Rudy and Trump's Russian collusion. My report would be your quote, guy in the Senate to push all the information, end quote. What did you mean by that? Senator Ron Johnson was our guy in the Senate. He was told to me that when we pushed the information, he's going to push it in the halls of Congress.

So when the media was getting skeptical about pushing disinformation after they've proven it wrong time and time again, the plan was to have a U.S. Senator, Ron Johnson, to push that disinformation even further. Correct. Because we had Congressman Nunoz already doing it, so Senator Ron Johnson jumped on board. this Congress, both Chairman Comer and Chairman Jordan, have centered this entire sham impeachment hearing on an FBI tip sheet.

This tip sheet made wild claims about bribery that didn't even come close to being backed up. And in fact, it's all being improved to be one big lie. Mr. Parnas, is the allegation in the FBI tip sheet based on the same fabricated claims that Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani flew you to Ukraine to dig up? Yes. I also want to make it clear that the informant allegedly behind this tip sheet is facing criminal charges for lying about the Biden family and was a known fraud for years before that. The same fabricated claim kept popping up and getting smacked down over and over again. In fact, our colleagues at the Foreign Affairs Committee did some amazing work on this in investigation and found that this lie dates back to December 2015 almost 10 years ago. Do you happen to know the article that I'm referring to?

I don't know the exact article, but I do know that the slide has started way back in 2015. About 10 years ago, it was an article entitled, quote, the Ukrainian scam of the Biden family, end quote. And it was posted to a Russian language media website registered in a city in Russian-occupied Crimea. Mr. Parnas, do you have any doubt that this fabrication claim, the claim that Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani sent you to U.S. Ukraine to try to dick up more information on. It's part of Russian propaganda

and an effort to destabilize Ukraine and undermine our democracy. As I sit here today, I have zero doubt that Russia's involved. This is a Russian campaign to interfere in our elections. Thank you. That's better than a Bravo

Real Housewives reunion. I mean, the tea he was spilling. They need a mop. That was brilliant. A lot less filler of that seed, though. Yeah. Yeah, probably not a surprise to our listeners to learn that Fox News was covering this hearing, and they dumped out in the middle of Lev's testimony.

I'm shocked. Let me tell you. Yeah. Well, one of the other things he said in addition to all that stuff in the clip was that basically he said that, you know, most media was skeptical of their claims, except for Fox and a few other right-wing media groups. And he called out Sean Hannity by name. As well as John Solomon.

Yeah. Yep. So, yeah. Hell of a hearing, boys. I wish that I could be, oh, let me use somebody's terminology, dictator for a day. You know, I wish that I could dictate how media should be run and what they're allowed to do.

and lying to your audiences, purposefully misleading them, should be illegal. It should be a crime, what Fox News is able to do. Oh, we're going to cut and splice and pick apart like the things that we actually want you to know. It is manipulative and it should be a crime. But it's not. Like they can just continue to do the same thing over and over again. And then we wonder why 30, 40 percent of the country are brain dead and are completely poisoned. because the virus is Fox and their ability to just distort the truth.

It's wild to me. But that, I mean, that line of questioning, congrats to Representative Maxwell Frost. Congrats to his team. Because it was brilliant. That is what you do. That is how you get things done and get to the truth. And I just, I mean awe, in awe at the fact that Donald Trump,

we're at a 50-50 toss-up of him being proud. It's just, wow. Well, speaking of that, we have. previous guest to the pot at Representative Eric Swalwell, contrasting the accusations against Joe Biden with the ones against President Trump. In your interactions with the Biden family, which you've told us all about throughout the day, did you ever observe the Chinese government grant 22 patents to any of Joe Biden's children while Joe Biden was in office? I did not. Did you ever observe the Chinese government, I'm sorry, did you ever observe Joe Biden ever own or operate

any hotels while he was in public office and take millions of dollars from foreign governments? I did not. Did you ever observe Joe Biden employ any of his children or their spouses in the White House as vice president or president? I did not. I can't speak to that. Did you ever observe while observing the Biden's, the Bidens install a family member to be the co-chair of the DNC? I'm sorry, ask the question again. Did you ever observe that Bidens install a family member to be the co-chair of the Democratic National Committee? I did not. Did President Biden or anyone in his family take $2 billion from the Saudi government?

Not that I'm aware of it. Did President Biden or anyone in his family get fined $355 million for tax fraud? Not that I'm aware of. Mr. Parnas, as you've observed Mr. Bubbolinsky today and his fealty and dedication and loyalty to the Trump family, is that something you recognize as somebody who was also in that Colt before? Absolutely. Is there hope for our man, Tony, here?

Very little, I think, until he hits a brick wall. And in your experience, on a scale of 1 to 10, how eager was the Trump campaign in your interactions to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden? 1 to 10, 10 being the highest? 10 plus. 10 plus. Would it surprise you, Mr. Parnas, that the Russians and in their disinformation campaign outlets have often cited Chairman Comer's testimony and allegations against the Biden family

to make their own allegations against Joe Biden. No, it doesn't surprise me because that's exactly what they want to happen. So I think I see what he was doing at the beginning there. I think I got it. See, everything he was saying was things that Donald Trump has actually done. I don't know if you guys picked up on that. Yeah, Jesus take the wheel, you know, on this. I know that Katie Porter.

has been in some hot water, but like, this is when I want the white board to come out, and I want you to say, like, here's the line down the middle. Here are all of the things that the Trump family has done. Here are all of the things that they've been found guilty on, and you are trying to impeach Biden on what exactly? Like, what's the claim? It's a circus. It's a circus.

But bravo to Swalwell. He always comes with it. That was very well done. And it was a really great way of making the point. job, Congressman Swallow. Can you imagine going to work every day and hating everybody that you were like literally, like really hating them? Not like, oh, I hope I don't run into Jody from accounting, just like hating every fucking

person that you pass. Like, I could not work on the Hill these days. I really could not. As full disclosure I've given before, my girlfriend works in Congress. And I once gave her a card that said, congratulations on getting to work in America's most toxic workplace for another year. Yeah, it's bad. Okay, let's shift gears a little here.

From campaign advisor and TPSA head, Charlie Kirk has a theme in his analysis. I'm going to shock you here. It's racism and stupidity. Thanks, Jesse. Here he offers how we could make America great again. My advice to the next generation is, you know, embrace tradition. Wind back the clock. Go back to how actually people talked in 1950s and 60s.

You're not allowed to say that. Oh, you're a racist. okay there were actually some good things in the 50s and 60s like people were way more polite and we less people with autism oh hot damn uh it was like a more decent country and people were like they knew where their neighbor was oh god it wasn't like a crazy thing to like walk into a neighbor's house like how you're doing i haven't heard from you in a little bit can i make you a meal even talk to our neighbors the kids used to go out and play now they go and look at their phone all day long i kind of miss that country i don't know about you

I don't think it was all just like bitterness and resentment. I think it was kind of cool when like kids walked to class and they had a firearm around their back. I think it was kind of cool. It was actually taught responsibility. It's like that's a weapon. You better take it seriously. We didn't have school shootings back then, by the way. People brought guns to school and put them in a locker.

It's funny how we had more guns around and there were less school shootings. I agree. I think we should go back to the days when people politely insisted that black people couldn't eat lunch at a counter or couldn't use the same water fountain. I mean, you could just go on and on and on. He is just, he is such an idiot. It is amazing to me how we have allowed the right wing to co-op words like tradition and use that as a veil for white supremacy and patriarchy. Like when they say, oh, you know, we should go back to tradition. The tradition of white men being on, top and everyone else being on the bottom. The politeness of what? Referring to black men as boys and black women as girls. The politeness of black people having to get off of a sidewalk that white

people were walking on. The politeness of having to divert your eyes. The politeness of sunset towns that are still on the books that if a black person were to be caught in that town after sunset, then a lynching was justified. Give me a fucking break. on the fantasy of white America that these motherfuckers want to go back to in the 50s and 60s over my dead body

and I literally mean that. I'm picturing Bull Connor politely breaking out the hoses. It is unreal like the euphemisms they come up with and saying things like, you know, oh, you used to know your neighbors. Yes, when people who didn't look like you

were forced to live, you know, or were not allowed to live in your neighborhood, it's absolutely unreal. And it sucks that, we have to give him any oxygen at all. But as you pointed out in your intro, he is an advisor to Donald Trump. So contestedly, apparently many arguments to the Trump campaign over how much influence he has.

Yeah. I also, since I unleashed the fire hose of bullshit, I have to just also say here. The gun thing he said was untrue. That was not a proliferated thing. And there was this thing called undiagnosed autism here, buddy. You know, we didn't quite know how to diagnose things. yet, and it's not because of the vaccines, but I know that gigantic head of his somehow does not house a braid.

Well, unfortunately, we now have his partner in content making, and a person, the Trump campaign, people regularly appear with Jack Posobio. Here he is talking at a Catholic event at Mar-a-Lago, which sounds like a rig of hell. And he's hyping his new book here on how to identify the cultural Marxists. Well, let's let the stupid run wild. Man, that's a really long way to go to say Jews. Yeah, the unhumans in there, really, that rhetoric each week for those of us who have to keep clocking this and paying attention to everything, that rhetoric, if we were doing a chart of how often these people are using it, is going up on a trend line that is very steep. It's not being called out on a regular basis.

This is the playbook. you begin to use dehumanizing rhetoric. It was poisoning the blood. It was vermin. And now it's animals and now unhuman. This is the trend. It sounds like, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Danielle, but it sounds like you're saying that this is the new abnormal.

Yeah. Have a great weekend, everyone. Last Friday, Donald Trump's former vice president, Mike Pence, announced he would not be endorsing his old boss in 2024. Pence said this during a live interview with Martha McCallum on Fox News, but since then, the network has barely mentioned it. Here to discuss is Media Matters Senior Fellow, Matt Gertz. Matt, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me back. Let's start with numbers. How much airtime did Fox give to letting its viewers know about what Pence said, and then I guess compare that to CNN and MSNBC?

Sure. So Fox News gave it four minutes of airtime. Oh, wow. CNN gave an hour 19, an MSNBC clocked in an hour and 14 minutes. A tiny, tiny fraction of what the other networks provided. Just to stress this, Mike Pence made this statement that he would not endorse Donald Trump during an interview on Fox News. So it was their exclusive that they were burying. They made the news and decided that their viewers didn't need to hear it. Yeah, I guess at the risk of being super obvious,

Explain why this matters. I mean, I think it's pretty clear that the reason Fox News decided not to cover this story is because they believe it is bad news for Donald Trump. If you think of Fox News as a conservative network, as a network that has deep principles that it is espousing, this is the sort of thing that would make no sense, right? I mean, Mike Pence, a longtime conservative leader, someone that Fox News, like to, quite a lot for years, but here he is saying that Donald Trump, the person under whom he served in the White House for four years, will not have his support in the election. You could imagine

different people at Fox having different reactions to that in which some of them might agree with him, some of them might disagree with him, but instead, largely what happened is the whole thing got swept under the rug. And I think the reason for that is that Fox News is not, in fact, a conservative network. It does not have an ideologically conservative position and angle on the news. It is a Trumpian propaganda outlet. It is an outlet that thinks first and foremost about how the news would impact the political efforts of Donald Trump and the Republicans who support him. And viewed from that angle, covering Mike Pence would be a trail of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. And so they decided not to mention it virtually at all.

Yeah, sometimes I'm not sure. And I might be wrong about this, but I'm not sure that people understand just how important deciding what not to cover is from an editorial perspective. I think everyone sort of intrinsically gets that deciding what to cover matters a lot. But deliberately choosing not to inform an audience of something, to me, I think it's just as important. Yeah. And I think When you consider what Mike Pence was trying to do, he gave the exclusive to Fox News, a network that lots of people on the right watch, where the audience is predominantly Republicans, and the argument that he made. I mean, he talked some about his differences on his constitutional duties that he exercised January 6th, which is his very nice way of saying Donald Trump tried to make me overturn the election in his favor. and I said no, and then his supporters marched on the Capitol chanting about how they wanted to kill me. A very nice way of putting that, but he said that was only a small part of it. He criticized

Trump for an agenda that is at odds with the conservative agenda, particularly on the federal debt, on abortion, on foreign policy. He was laying out distinctions that he, as a traditional conservative, had with Donald Trump and explaining that because of those differences, he did not feel that he could support his former running mate. Now, that's basically a permission structure for Fox News viewers to join him if they are also motivated more by ideology than by the sort of Trump cult effect. But Fox News is very much part of that cult. It is an enforcer of that cult. And so Mike Pence said something that was inconvenient, said something that could have led some of its viewers to act against Donald Trump. And so this was a story that they had to keep from their

audience. Yeah, you know, a lifetime ago when I worked there, I don't know if you were aware of that, Matt, I, you worked there. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. But back then it felt, at least to me, it felt like there were actual journalists among the anchors and hosts. You know, people like Shep Smith, who was long gone, obviously. You also had Brett Bear and a couple of others. Obviously, Bear is still there, but at least to me, it feels a lot different now. Or would you say it was always this way and I just didn't see it? Well, a little from column A, a little from column B. I mean, look, I've been, I have always thought that the Fox News apparatus was obviously putting its finger on the scales in favor of Republicans and the sort of right-wing movement. But I do think that you are correct

that basically everyone who thought that their job was providing news to their viewers, even news that was somewhat more right-coded than at other outlets, is more or less gone. And what's more, many of them have come out since and said, look, Fox News has become a total Trump propaganda outlet. It was functioning more or less as state TV during his presidency. It's interesting. I mean, when you think of Fox News as sort of a machine, there are always people who will want to be the new cogs. Right.

And so when people who have like any sense at all that they want to be actually providing news to their viewers, when they decide that things have gone too far and they leave the network, what ends up happening is someone's going to fill that hole. And it's going to be someone who is fine. with what Fox News is putting out. And so you can see a fairly steady decline as the folks who would occasionally be critical of the Republican Party line, have enough leave and are replaced by people who are just fine with it, or like, I think Brett Baer, become more and more either comfortable with it or just assume that if they were to try to do more, that they would either be, replaced with someone worse or that it wouldn't break through anyway. People can make a lot of rationalizations around this sort of thing. This was not just a problem with the opinion side,

the sort of blackout of Mike Pence. On special report, this is the flagship news side broadcast of Fox News. The discussion was solely on the roundtable panel. They didn't even give it a full segment. And, you know, really no one else on the news side did either. It was discussed some by Neil Kovir. Vudo, who I think is probably the most vocal person left at the network, which is I find fairly astonishing, but it is nonetheless true. And that was basically it. Laura Ingraham used the news to criticize Mike Pence. But everybody else, everyone in Fox Prime Time just ignored it altogether. They just don't want their viewers to know about any of this. Do you think this was an edict from on high that, hey, we're not going to talk about this? Or do you think that all these anchors

and hosts independently came to the conclusion that they didn't want to talk about it. We've certainly seen cases where these edicts have come down. We at Media Matters have published internal emails from Top Fox executives, telling the talent to cover or not cover particular stories. You know, we don't have evidence in this case. It's possible that that's true, but also at this point, everyone knows the score. You don't really need an edict when you you've effectively gotten rid of all of the people who would consider taking a different tact. You can just kind of go on the fact that like no one's, no one's going to step out of line. No one's going to risk angry the audience.

No one's going to risk making the wrong decision and then getting a call from an angry executive or anything like that. So, you know, at this point, again, I think people understand that Fox's purpose is helping Donald Trump and the Republican Party win elections, that's very clear down the line. And I think that at this point has been fully incorporated into the decision-making process for everyone over there. Yeah. Fox has had a bit of, I guess you could call it an up-and-down relationship with Trump. Though, of course, it seems clear that it's back up right now and I would assume it will be through the election. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think broadly speaking,

Fox News has not been willing to really stand up to Donald Trump since he became the leading figure in the Republican presidential primary race back in 2016. After the election, from time to time, you would get a sense from watching Fox News that some people over there would be perfectly happy if Donald Trump were no longer the leading figure in Republican politics. You saw a lot of push around Rondisantis in 2021 and 2022. And when those Dominion emails came out during that defamation suit, what they showed was Rupert Murdoch responding to January 6th by saying that Fox wanted to make Trump a nonperson. And he wrote an email to Suzanne Scott, the Fox News CEO, in which he said that the network shouldn't mention his name unless essential and certainly don't support him. So here's a case where actually there was a top-down dictate that the network should try not to give too much help to

Donald Trump. At the same time, as we also learned from that Dominion lawsuit, Fox is desperately terrified about not doing anything to publicly annoy Donald Trump because they fear, rightfully, that he could drag their audience away, that he could tell their viewers, stop watching Fox News, go watch Newsmax or O-A-N or what have you, and that that could take down the company. And because of that, they could never really make a full break from Trump. Once the various charges in federal and state court got filed, the network was fully on board, every step of the way, going back to the barricades for him. And that really gave him a glide path to the Republican nomination for 2024.

And now that he's in that position, they are fully, fully supportive of him, no doubt. Yeah. Also, can we talk about how weird what Rupert Murdoch said was? The idea that a chairman of a quote-unquote news network would say that they would make someone a non-person and not mention their name, call me a starry-eyed, naive, whatever, that doesn't seem to me to be how a news network should operate. Yeah, this was the most remarkable thing, I think, of those Dominion filings. It wasn't just that they showed that the network was perfectly willing to lie about whether the election had been stolen. It was the communications from Rupert Murdoch that make it abundantly clear that the network is Republican propaganda, that that is its purpose.

So that is what it's for. You know, there were emails that he sent in which he specifically demanded that Fox do more coverage of Republicans in tight Senate races in order to help them win elections. Negative comments about Lindsey Graham in 2020 on Lou Dobbs's show should be countered by positive comments on Sean Hannity's show. So, you know, he had the networks deliberately taking sides in particular Republican primaries. And then, yeah, these comments in which literally you have the owner of the network telling the CEO give negative or give no coverage of a major political figure. If communications like that about a Republican from at any other network got out, Fox News would be running with it for years.

This would be their proof of liberal media bias forever. We would never be allowed to forget that such a thing had happened. It truly is remarkable, both that he wrote all of that stuff down and that everyone just kind of shrugged and said, yeah, I mean, I guess Fox is basically propaganda. Oh, well, it really is quite something. Yeah, I guess to sort of go back to the Pence thing, what Fox did with that, burying it, not mentioning it, that's not unusual for them, right? we see this, I would say, maybe almost on a daily basis. I mean, we see it with, they will

champion the hell out of impeachment hearings for Joe Biden. And then when the hearings turn out to be the height of ridiculousness, as anybody with half a brain could have said, they sort of stop covering them. Absolutely. And it happens up and down the dial on something like that. I mean, you know, we did a study of Sean Hannity's coverage of Hunter Biden in 2023. And that required looking at 325 segments that he did about the president's son over the course of a year, just an immense amount of coverage for someone who does not hold elective office. And interestingly, the coverage that Hannity did helped pave the way for Republicans to try to impeach Joe Biden over 100 Biden's business interests. But it hasn't gone very well because it turns out

that when you try to build an impeachment case around the deep lore from Sean Hannity's shows, it's totally inexplicable to any normal human being. The only people who know what any of these people are talking about are people like me, who are forced to watch Hannity's show and his actual viewers. And so because of that, the whole thing's been a complete flop. Last night, we had what I'm calling as time of death for this whole inquiry. 901 p.m. on Wednesday night, we're going to call it, because that's when Sean Hannity opened his show by saying, you know, we're going to talk about the hearing. But first, we're going to talk about the big story of the day, which is Joe Biden's poll numbers. He from there went through his monologue, about halfway through the monologue. He drops in like three minutes of discussion of the major impeachment hearing that had been held earlier that day. Most of what he's talking about. about is trying to make fun of AOC, because that, I guess, is the most important thing about the

hearing. And from there, he just moved on to other things. You know, like, the whole thing is, is collapsing around him. The edifice that he has personally devoted months and years of his life to constructing. And so it's not going well. And so he's just going to stop talking about it, I guess. That's how they operate. And so forever, people who get their news from five. are going to believe that there was some sort of deep corruption involved with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and Ukraine and China and various weird talking points that I won't force your audience to sit through. It was all bullshit, but that's going to stick in their heads because the people who told them that there was some real corruption there are never going to say, oops, we screwed the whole thing up.

We had nothing. Sorry. Yeah, it really is a great little magic trick, the vanishing story. Matt, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. As you know, I've been a lifelong fan of Media Matters. And it's just, you know, it's just always great to check in with what's going on there. Thanks for having me. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal.

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