Media Matters Fellow Matthew Gertz Exposes Propaganda for Trump

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Yeah, Fox is absolutely losing control as we've got one of the worst jobs reports in recent history.

The August report came in, only 22,000 jobs were created.

The June report was revised down, negative 13,000 or 14,000 jobs.

And I would expect these other months to get revised down as well.

So what does Fox do?

They bring on Kevin Hassett, Trump's chief economic advisor.

And you'll never guess this.

What he tries to do is blame the Bureau of Labor Statistics that they were the one who did it.

The statisticians did it, everybody.

Come on here, play the split.

Go ahead and get your hot take.

It's not the number you wanted.

It was not the number that was expected.

How come?

Right.

Well, one of the things we know is that they've been really at the LS struggling with bad response rates.

And Goldman Sachs put out a study yesterday that said that they've been messing up the August seasonal so much that over the last 10 to 15 years they've tended to have to revise up the number by around almost 70,000 jobs when they get the new final survey.

So it's their fault?

And so, well, I'm saying that this number, we expect this number will be revised up.

That's fed the pattern over and over.

All right.

Then they bring on Lori Chavez-DeReamer, the labor secretary, and she says, even though

it was only 22,000 jobs, it was actually, this is good.

This is good news.

We're in the positive.

We're all good.

Here, play this clip.

You admit to being just a little disappointed by this weakening job market?

Well, 22,000 jobs underperformed just a bit, but it's still in the positive.

Almost a half a million jobs have been created since the president took office.

It's going to take some time.

But again, when everybody's working for the American people and the American worker and somebody chooses not to, and they're instrumental in those decisions that affect the market, that affect the wage growth, that affect all of those things.

Do your job.

And I know that the president's not going to let up on this, and neither am I.

And then while she's on Fox, she goes and blames Jerome Powell and says, Powell is the one who should really be embarrassed about this jobs report, your play this clip.

The job market's slowing.

Surely there is no excuse for the Fed not to lower interest rates sharply.

I'm sure you agree with that, Madam Secretary.

Absolutely.

Jerome Powell should be embarrassed by this report because he has not done his job.

You know, the president was right in 2016, and the president is right now.

Everybody has done their job.

The president and his tariff talks, the trade deals, the trade deficit, making sure that that is for the American people, that he has balanced that.

Congress did their part in passing the one big beautiful bill, the working tax cuts for

Americans.

But Jerome Powell has not.

Oh, but it's Jerome Powell's fault.

And you see how Fox, the coverage just evolved to to then find, okay, who's the scapegoat?

Okay, it's not Trump.

It's Jerome Powell.

He should have lowered the interest rates.

Now you need to lower the interest rates.

That's their narrative.

And they push that the whole day.

Let's bring in Matt Gertz, senior fellow over at Media Matters.

And Matt tracks this type of behavior by Fox.

by right-wing media in general.

And this is par for the course of what they do, whether it's with the economy, Matt, whether it is with authoritarian

acts like Trump putting military into the cities.

They justify it.

They create their fake world.

It takes them some time a little bit sometimes.

And then once they get it, boom, over and over again.

And then, you know, so talk to us about what you're seeing.

Yep.

What's really fascinating about those two clips is that the arguments are diametrically opposed, right?

You've got Hassett saying the numbers are wrong and they're going to be revised up.

And actually, we probably created a lot more jobs than this.

But the labor secretary is saying, oh, the numbers are right and they're soft.

And that's the reason.

And the reason for that is that the Federal Reserve hasn't changed rates yet and they should do it.

These don't cohere in any real way.

In fact, if job creation is going gangbusters, as Trump is constantly claiming, and as Hassett clearly wants people to think, then there's no reason to lower rates.

If the labor secretary is right, on the other hand, that the economy is slowing, which is something that Trump will not say,

then it would make sense for the rates to cut.

But you have to pick a lane on this one.

And, you know, Fox's role in all of this is to just kind of let the Republicans talk, accept whatever they say as fact, and kind of, you know, go from there.

But in this case, the argument is so conflicted against itself that I think they might actually end up having some trouble, or at least they're going to have to pick a lane.

You're going to have different shows producing sort of diametrically opposed takes based on which of those theories that they're glomming onto.

You know, one of the things that they've been doing also is they went from utilizing all these stories about Epstein against Trump's political opponents.

I mean, they were one of the biggest champions of the Epstein files.

Trump's going to be bringing transparency to Epstein.

And then now you don't hear a word about it.

They won't cover the press conference at all.

They act like it doesn't exist at all.

And instead, they focus on all these.

They always pick up all these other narratives and fake stories too when they're trying to cover up the Epstein stuff.

You know, they'll bring bring up Sidney Sweeney's jeans and everyone's angry about the jeans.

Everybody like, dude, no one cares about the jeans.

Have you heard about the Cracker Barrel logo?

I don't care about the cracker.

The left is angry.

The left isn't angry.

No one's we're thinking about the jobs numbers.

Talk to us about what you're seeing there.

You wrote a whole article about how Fox is working with the Trump regime to kill the Epstein story from right-wing media.

Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that that is what happened.

Trump told them to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein, and that's basically what they've done.

You know, I was watching

the coverage of the press conference as it was going on earlier this week because I'm, you know, kind of bonkers.

I'm watching four different cable networks at the same time.

And what you see is CNN and MSNBC taking the feed live from this press conference.

Fox basically ignored it the entire time.

They came in for like a two-minute clip from Marjorie Taylor Greene and then moved on to other things.

They do not want to talk about this at all.

The reason is because Donald Trump told them to stop talking about it.

And they are totally willing to obey his orders.

Remember, this was a story that consumed the right for years.

It was Republicans who were saying that Jeffrey Epstein was a big story.

And then Donald Trump's Justice Department and FBI, headed by people who had previously been big figures in the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory movement, came out and said, actually, there's nothing to see here.

And you have this brief period where some people on the right were saying, hey, what's going on here?

We thought there was something to the Jeffrey Epstein story.

Now you're saying that there isn't.

And Trump has been trying to get them to shut up about it.

uh for weeks now and i think at this point he's he's basically succeeded people who spent years talking about Jeffrey Epstein don't want to do it anymore because Trump told them not to.

Why did Trump tell them not to?

Well, no one's got more close ties to Jeffrey Epstein in political, in politics, than Donald Trump does.

They were close friends for years.

You know, and now you have a situation where

the number two at the Justice Department, who used to be Donald Trump's personal lawyer, has been sitting down with Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's number two.

Maxwell says, oh, there was, you know, Donald Trump never did anything wrong

and then got moved to a minimum security prison.

The whole thing smells.

But on Fox News, viewers don't hear about that.

And that's really how Fox News functions.

Sometimes they provide rebuttals for stories that make Republicans look bad.

But more often than not, what they're doing is just turning their viewers away from those stories and pointing them somewhere else, whether it's towards

the Sweeney story or Cracker Barrel or trying to drum up support for Donald Trump to send federal troops into Chicago, as we've seen lately.

Yeah, man, that's what I want to talk about before we go, of course, is it seems like a page out of the neocon playbook in the war in Iraq, WMDs justifying an invasion, but they're taking the playbook of WMDs in Iraq and saying Chicago's a hellhole that needs an invasion by the United States military to make the people obedient.

You have to subjugate to the authoritarian.

And then they go into all of these other cities, you know, mostly blue cities, all blue cities and states, and push the same narrative and ignore the stats about the red states and where, and what else is happening across the country.

And so they're priming people, it seems to me, just for straight-up authoritarianism.

And, you know, I follow a lot of these accounts like

Russian Monitor, where they look at the Russian types of TV and the stuff they do there.

And I'm looking at Fox and I see no, I'm like, this is in many ways worse, or just as bad, at least sometimes.

What do you you make of it?

I mean, what we've seen for years now since the Biden administration is

a constant effort by right-wing media and Fox News in particular to claim that

the country is facing a crime crisis.

Sometimes it's a migrant crime crisis.

Sometimes it's just crime in general.

But what they do is they take individual anecdotes of crimes normally that take place in blue cities and blue states, and they run them over and over again on the network.

And they use that to claim that America is facing a massive crisis in crime.

Now, there was a huge uptick in violent crime in the United States.

It began in 2020 when Donald Trump was president, as you may recall.

I know a lot of people like to memory hole that, but it is in fact the case.

And, you know, it rose for a couple of years and then it started falling at a very precipitous level.

And so right now you have Fox News saying that Chicago is a war zone.

You've got Donald Trump saying that it's the murder capital of the world.

When in reality, if you look at the actual crime statistics,

Chicago was not one of the top 20 cities for murder rate in 2024.

And this year, it's seeing the lowest rates of shootings and murders since the 1960s.

So, you know, I don't want to downplay the trauma caused by individual murders and other violent crimes.

It's terrible.

It's important to have

good

strategies for reducing crime in this country.

But the reality is the crisis atmosphere that Trump is trying to use to justify sending troops into the streets is really a concoction of right-wing media who are trying to grease the skids for that.

And I think it's a really dangerous situation.

It is a situation situation where Trump has been trying for years to create justifications for putting military troops on the streets of American cities.

And Fox is sort of giving him the incentives to do so.

And finally, Matt, I know you've been tracking this.

Media Matters famously put out one of those graphics of how on social media platforms, the right wing was dominating a lot of these social media platforms heading into

this second round of the Trump administration, which I now call the Trump regime.

But there has been a lot of work of independent media, you know, to push back.

I mean, look, my own view is that X is, which used to be Twitter, is a little bit of a lost cause generally.

We should try to compete on it.

ASIN from the Midas Touch Network, I think, was the biggest bubble out there competing with the right,

competing with the right wing.

But Elon puts his

finger so much on the scale that X and Twitter is a tough one to break.

But I think if you've been looking at YouTube, you're seeing independent media from Democracy Hub, pro-democracy media is,

I think, starting to beat a lot of the right wing stuff in other platforms.

Are you seeing signs, though, of hope in the media with new things being

constructed with what we're seeing in Fox and then corporate news not meeting people's expectations, we'll just say.

I think we're starting to see more of that.

I think we're starting to see more independent outlets growing and gaining audience from it.

I think the

corporate media landscape is getting pretty scary.

I think we've seen over at CBS News now,

what is effectively a takeover of one of America's big three news networks by a close ally of the president, who is now reportedly trying to install Barry Weiss, a conservative pundit,

at its sort of apex.

And

that is

a page out of the authoritarian playbook.

It is replacing what had previously been critical news outlets with leadership that will bring them more into line with what the regime wants.

And as that continues, I think there's going to be more and more space for independent news outlets to flourish.

If they have the support they need,

if we have enough people willing to

go out and make the case for our values.

And that's, I think, what we're really going to need in the years to come.

Matt Gertz, Media Matters, senior fellow.

You're one of the number one targets for right-wing people to attack.

I want people to know how important your work is.

There's a reason that they kind of single you out particularly and Media Matters.

It's because you're exposing what they're doing and and it makes them very nervous.

Thanks for all of your work, man.

Thank you, too.

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