What A Day - Fox News Forgets Trump’s Failed War

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

For a third time, the U.S. House has voted to end the Iran war, approving a war powers resolution that would halt President Donald Trump's ability to continue military action without congressional approval. And apparently the American people agree. According to new polling shared exclusively with Pod Save the World, 75 percent of independents think Trump is doing a bad job handling the conflict. So what is Trump's favorite television network saying about Iran these days? To find out, Jane speaks with Matt Gertz, Senior Fellow at Media Matters.Show Notes: Check out Matt's work – tinyurl.com/3xztsuxy Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

This wasn't a war that the president sold to the American public. This was a war that Fox News sold to Donald Trump. It's Wednesday, September 16th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is Waday, recording today from Washington, D.C. Yet for more than five years, inflation has been running above target. So our predominant focus is on the price stability side of our mandate. The plain fact is that inflation is too high and has been for too long.

And they did it. The Federal Reserve raised its interest rate Wednesday for the first time since 2023. The increase is an effort to quell stubbornly high inflation. Now we'll just get to wait for President Donald Trump to start his tirade against his newly appointed Fed chair, Kevin Warsh. Trump got his feelings hurt yesterday, too. On Tuesday, the Trump-aligned Kennedy Center board voted to close most of the iconic performing arts venue.

The decision came just hours after a federal judge blocked the institution from returning Trump's name to the building. In a post on True Social, Trump said the closure was needed for repairs. But apparently, those repairs, which Congress had allocated $257 million to cover, could only happen if the board was allowed to move forward with plans to add his name to the building. A federal judge has said twice that can't happen without the approval of Congress. So instead, no Kennedy Center for anyone. For the third time, the U.S. House has voted to end the war in Iran, approving a war power's resolution that would halt Trump's ability to continue military action without congressional approval. However, none of those actions have actually made it to Trump's desk where he would definitely veto them.

But let's be clear, the war in Iran is incredibly unpopular. According to new polling from the Eurasia Group and YouGov, 75% of independents think Trump is doing a bad job handling the conflict. So what is Trump's favorite television network to do? To find out, I'm joined by Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters. Matt, welcome back to what a day. Thanks so much for having me back. So you did some reporting on how Fox News has been handling the Iran War on its opinion shows.

What did you find? I found that they've stopped handling it, more or less. There's been a huge drop in how much Fox's most popular shows have been covering this war. It dropped 79% from June into August. And that came as there was a series of full starts on further escalations. The Strait of Hormuz remained closed. And, you know, we still have a huge fleet. of U.S. forces camped out over there. But at Fox, they had just stopped paying attention.

So our friends at POTS Day of the World got a look at new polling from the Eurasia Group and UGOV that shows the Iran War is polling at 34% with Americans and pretty much everybody hates it. And that number is beginning to include Republicans whose strong approval for the war has dropped 15 points since April. What bind has that put Fox News in? It has put them in a very difficult one. Fox News, their bread and butter is serving up stories to their audience that make them feel good. They make them feel like Donald Trump is a hero, that his administration has the country moving in the right direction, that he has his enemies on the run. And the Iran War has stopped being that sort of story. In the early weeks, Fox was happy to have a, ton of coverage of the war, claiming that it was going to be over soon, that it in fact was already over, that we had won. And as the weeks and months have passed, that argument just can't sell anymore. And so their problem is they can't admit that they were wrong.

They can't admit that the Iran war was a bad idea, because the bulk of Republicans are still behind it. But they keep losing little by little more and more Republicans who no longer support it. In the long run, it's a huge dilemma. In the short run, though, they're just stuck. I'm curious, because I know that you've been doing this work for a long time, how this compares with the network's handling of, say, the war in Iraq. Megan Kelly, the former Fox News host and an independent right-wing podcaster has talked about how when she was at Fox, the, you know, basically every war was a good war. They had to be supportive of any Republican president going to war at all. So in your view, how does the handling by Fox News of the Iran War compare to

how the network handled the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? I would say certainly there was a similar level of early belief that the war was going to be over quickly, that the U.S. was going to be triumphant. But I think over time, we saw a more durability to the Fox position on the Iraq war than we've seen on Iran. On Iraq, they were happy to keep telling their audience that everything was going well for years and years. They were happy to push for the surge of additional forces under General Petraeus in the second Bush term. You know, all wars under Republicans are popular until they're managed by Democrats. And then all of a sudden, you know, the Democrat is messing it all up and preventing victory from happening. But in this particular case,

you have some of that. You have some people on Fox who are pushing for more escalation. But I think right now in particular, with the midterms approaching, there's a palpable sense that talking more about this can't help them in any way. And so they're just not. So something that's been interesting to me, as I remember, the buildup to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that in comparison to those conflicts where you had Colin Powell going to the UN Security Council with, you know, a bottle of what turned out to be fake anthrax. You had a whole, you know, full court press selling this war, not just to Fox News, but to the media in general. But with this conflict, there has been very little effort to sell this war to Americans. It's just kind of, it's happening, and it's happening for roughly a dozen different reasons, some of which conflict with one another. And you're just supposed to put up with it. How has Fox News, I mean, you've mentioned, you know, obviously they've stopped talking about it, but how did they try to sell the war?

war at the beginning. Yeah, it's a great point. This wasn't a war that the president sold to the American public. This was a war that Fox News sold to Donald Trump. The president watches Fox News religiously. It really shapes his worldview to a great extent. Hosts like Sean Hannity have immense influence because the president is watching their programs and he is listening to them. And so you can put together the right mix of buttering up and some sort of policy shift and pitch it on your television show, you might be able to make this happen. And that's why I've called this war the most consequential case of this Fox Trump feedback loop that we've seen through both of the president's terms. People like Sean Hannity and Mark Levine and Brian Kilmead in the month of February

were out day after day promoting the idea that this war was a good idea, that as U.S. forces were moving toward Iran, that they should be used. Then it would be over quickly, that they would be able to get the uranium, that the president could be an historic figure, do something that no president before him had been able to do by smashing the Iranian regime. And he apparently bought that. You would see him posting clips from different Fox shows that he'd liked. And there's been reporting from behind the scenes

that he was mentioning segments from Sean Hannity about the war to other people in the White House. So these hawkish Fox News figures who had been pushing for some sort of military action in Iran for decades, really, finally managed to break through. They

found a president who was apparently unaware that Iran would be able to close the strait of Hormuz and cause massive global turmoil if they were attacked. And they got to him. He listened to them. And six months later, here we are. So if Fox News isn't talking about the war in Iran on its opinion shows, I hesitate to ask, but what are they talking about instead? Well, they're talking about the culture war, not the Iran War. They're talking about common enemies that their viewers have been convinced to share over the years. A lot of the coverage is of communism and socialism, the idea that the Democratic Party has been taken over by radicals. We, you know, as we counted mentions of

Iran, we also counted mentions of communism, and socialism, and there were about four times as many of them from these Fox shows in August, as there were mentions of Iran. They're also talking a lot about the WNBA, not who is winning particular games or who is scoring a lot of points, but about whether white basketball players are being attacked by black basketball players due to racism on the court, whether there is some sort of trans infusion. that is on the verge of happening to the league. These are the types of stories that their viewers can all agree on, apparently, in a way that the Iran war, they just can't.

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Visit wildgrain.com slash wad to get $30 off your first box, plus free croissants for life. Again, that's wildgren.com slash wad for $30 off your first box and free croissants for life, or use promo code Wad at checkout. Let's get back to my conversation with Matt Gertz. I'm interested to know, so there's obviously reporting on the war itself, but then there's kind of the knock-on effects of the war. And we've seen, you know, the biggest one, I think, for many people, would be oil prices and gas prices. The New York Times actually had a great write-up on how the price of oil going up in a bunch of countries, including the United States, has caused massive upheaval, protests in the streets. Like, it's been a really big deal. How is Fox News talking about

the cost of living or oil prices or gas prices while not talking about the war in Iran? Or are they just not talking about the cost of living? Yeah, it's been a difficult issue for them and I think is pretty similar to the overall coverage of the Iran War. In the early months of the war, you would have reporting on higher gas prices, but largely to say that it was all temporary, that it would surely go down soon, definitely go down by the end of the summer or by the midterms. And as those timelines kept stretching, the amount of coverage kept falling. And so it's just not a common subject of discussion on Fox News right now. This is what I call the kind of negative space of Fox News.

We spend a lot of time talking about what Fox does cover, but the stories that fall out of the rotation, the ones that they just stop talking about altogether can be quite interesting as well. And I think gas prices and affordability more generally are definitely in that category. What else have they stopped talking about? I think that that concept of negative space is really interesting. So they're not talking about the war in Iran. They're not talking about gas prices. They're not talking about affordability. what other important stories, whether they're tied to Iran or not, are they just not talking about? The big one I would say is the issue of a corruption in the Trump family. You know, I spent a lot of time over the last decade, really, following how Fox treated the business interests of Hunter Biden and whether or not that implicated Joe Biden in some way. They spent an unbelievable amount of time dealing with those issues. But when it comes to the Trump family, they ignore it entirely.

You know, I think the latest example would be the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., having his wedding reportedly bankrolled by a Russian oligarch with ties to Vladimir Putin. This story broke earlier this week from ProPublica. It got plenty of play on the broadcast networks, on the cable networks, digital outlets, everyone else. It's been, it's the most popular story of the ProPublica site in years. And yet Fox has devoted three minutes of coverage total to that story, all of it from Brett Baer's special report program. So that is, I think, indicative of the broader issue. You don't see coverage of the president's crypto holdings. you don't see coverage of the incestuous business relationships between him and the Emirati government.

You don't see coverage of the Trump organization doing international business deals in the Middle East and elsewhere. Those are stories that are, again, part of this negative space, these things that just can't be told to the Fox audience that are just unspinnable. There's no way even for someone like Sean Hannity to explain why this is actually okay. And so the strategy under those circumstances is just to ignore it altogether. Here's my, I think, big question for you, because I think it goes back to a point that we talked about at the beginning, the bind that Fox News is in, which is that the war has a fair amount of support from Republicans and also, obviously, support from Donald Trump, the most important audience. But the war does not have broad approval even in right-wing media. We've seen a host of figures, including Megan Kelly, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who now has his own YouTube empire. None of them are supportive of the war in Iran.

Obviously, some of them give kind of varying responsibility for the war to varying people, all managed to somehow make Trump not responsible, except for Tucker Carlson, who has decided that he hates Trump now. But I'm interested if there is pressure on Fox News from its right on this issue, where you have a burgeoning right-wing independent media that is extraordinarily against the war on Iran. And yes, they are blaming the war on Iran on Israel and kind of arguing that Trump was fooled into doing this. Or they are just saying, you know, that this is all going very poorly and Trump should know that. Maybe he doesn't. But I'm wondering, is there some pressure in that direction for Fox News to maybe start discussing the war?

Or is, I mean, it does seem like they're in the weird vice between a president that they are serving, an audience that wants to hear good news about that president, and a right wing that is increasingly opposed to the conflict, they help to launch. It's interesting. You know, you would expect a right wing network, a right wing, you know, theoretically journalism outpost. to have a sort of debate about among people on the right, about the proper course of action. And that didn't really happen in the lead up to this war. Instead, what you had was people like Sean Hannity and Mark Levine and Brian Kilme making the case for the war. And then you had other hosts like Jesse Waters and Laura Engram who just kind of ignored that it was about to happen. you could kind of guess at why that was the decision that they took, but what you didn't see was real dissent on the airwaves. That has led to fairly sustained pushback over the last

several months, really, you know, since the war began from that independent riding media. Those people are clearly sensing that they can carve out an independent niche, that they can carve out their own audiences who agree with them on these issues and keep them around in part by attacking Fox News over this. And so you see attacks from Megan Kelly and Tucker Carlson against Fox News for its coverage of the war. In the same way you'd see attacks from newsmax over Fox not spending enough time talking about election denial. This is a right-wing media coalition, so to speak, that has a lot of splits that is quite competitive, that has, you know, people trying to carve out their own audiences from each other, steal other people's

viewers away. And so there's quite a lot of attacks on Fox News for what they put on the air, but there isn't a lot of variation from the different Fox hosts about, you know, what it is that they're airing. Matt, as always, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. That was my conversation with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters. Before we go, paying attention to politics can you feel scary. It's endless information and conflict, and sometimes it can be hard to understand what's really going on. That's where Nate Silver, Claire Malone, and Galen Drew come in.

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