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20 Oct, 6 tweets, 3 min read
Fox News is now pushing for Barr or Trump to appoint a special counsel to investigate the Hunter Biden smear story. It is is reminiscent of the network’s successful campaign to get a House Select Committee on Benghazi. mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-p…
Reminder: The premise of "Obamagate," which Trump has called the biggest scandal ever, is that Obama secretly ordered investigations to damage Trump politically.
The plan for if Biden wins seems to pretty obviously be to do the thing Fox has been claiming for years that Obama did -- start a partisan investigation to hamstring the new administration.
This is where you should read @brianbeutler on Republican bad faith: crooked.com/articles/repub…
@brianbeutler (This was also the plan in 2016 if Hillary had won.) washingtonpost.com/politics/house…
@brianbeutler Left-of-center journalists are discussing the relative merits of Truth and Reconciliation campaigns versus Trump admin prosecutions.

Meanwhile, GOP congressmen and their party organ are telling Trump and Barr to appoint a Hunter Biden special counsel.

mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-p…

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More from @MattGertz

Matthew Gertz Profile picture
20 Oct
Every presidential election since that era has featured at least one controversy involving Sinclair’s open support for the Republican nominee. mediamatters.org/sinclair-broad…
2004: Sinclair ordered stations to pre-empt regular programming and broadcast a documentary that smeared Kerry's war record(under pressure they backed off and aired a special featuring portions of the documentary instead).
2008: Sinclair aired a conservative group’s swing state advertisement linking Obama to Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers. CNN and Fox News had both declined to run the ad.
Read 7 tweets
Matthew Gertz Profile picture
16 Oct
Prior iterations of Fox News were effective at converting independents to GOP partisans; the current version mainly radicalizes the base.
Of course that makes it particularly dangerous when the president is part of that base and shapes federal policy around the network's programming. mediamatters.org/coronavirus-co…
And Fox's role as a GOP power center won't end if Trump loses -- too many party politicians have figured out how to game the network's coverage to bootstrap their careers. mediamatters.org/fox-news/its-n…
Read 4 tweets
Matthew Gertz Profile picture
15 Oct
Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch is reportedly “disgusted” by President Donald Trump’s failed handling of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. He and his son Lachlan Murdoch are also partly responsible for it. mediamatters.org/coronavirus-co…
Murdoch has complained to confidants that Trump “is not listening to advice about how best to handle the pandemic," which is “creating a never-ending crisis for his administration,” the Daily Beast reports.

Not quite.
Trump is ignoring experts, that's true. But he is taking advice -- from Murdoch employees at Fox. The network's hosts have a direct line to the president, and his coronavirus response has been shaped by their shows and private counsel.
Read 6 tweets
Matthew Gertz Profile picture
15 Oct
"More Americans are going to die from the novel coronavirus COVID-19 because President Donald Trump is watching Fox News and listening when the network’s hosts minimize the risks posed by the deadly epidemic." -- Me on March 6. mediamatters.org/coronavirus-co…
This was extremely predictable and I know that because I fucking predicted it! All it took was the basic understanding that the president of the United States believes the shit Rupert Murdoch's employees tell him and would act accordingly. mediamatters.org/coronavirus-co…
There had been around 500 recorded COVID-19 cases in the U.S. and a handful of deaths when I wrote that the Fox-Trump feedback loop was about to get a lot of people killed.

We're now approaching 8 million cases and have cleared 217,000 deaths, with no end in sight.
Read 4 tweets
Matthew Gertz Profile picture
13 Oct
Great thread here from Parker. One point I'll add -- Fox News has an unrivaled hold on the Republican Party, from agenda-setting to candidate selection. That moves the GOP away from a majoritarian message -- but sometimes it wins anyway.
Donald Trump spent much of the 2016 campaign in a similar Fox feedback loop. And his message did not command the support of a majority of voters. But he got enough to win in the Electoral College despite getting three million fewer votes.
Once he was in office, Fox had more power over his administration than any media outlet has had in recent history. Here are 15 examples from the last two years, they influenced everything from personnel to a government shutdown. mediamatters.org/donald-trump/1…
Read 7 tweets
Matthew Gertz Profile picture
12 Oct
The press is getting worked by Republicans on court expansion
mediamatters.org/2020-supreme-c…
All four of the agenda-setting broadcast Sunday morning political talk shows discussed GOP complaints about potential court expansion.

Only one referenced Pence dodging Roe Q, which set it off.

None mentioned him dodging Q on peaceful transfer of power.
At the very moment that Republicans are violating political norms to cement conservative control of the court, they are demanding journalists focus on whether Biden might engage in his own norm violations to counter it in the future.
Read 4 tweets

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