Transcript: Fox in Meltdown as Fox’s Own Poll Turns Brutal for Trump

As Trump’s mounting failures and cratering numbers rattle Fox figures, a media critic charts the deep cognitive dissonance that Trump’s collapse has unleashed on the right—and why it will get worse.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 18 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Fox News suddenly finds itself in a very strange situation. A new Fox poll just landed that contains absolutely awful news for Trump and Republicans. And a number of very bad stories for Trump have broken of late.

That’s a big problem for a network that has the word “news” in its title, yet also can’t keep its audience if it tells the truth about Trump. So Fox has taken to largely ignoring a lot of these very big bad stories. And this has us wondering what’ll happen to the whole institutional superstructure that’s arisen around our homegrown MAGA fascist movement if Trump soon passes from the scene.

So we’re talking to our go-to person on Fox, Matt Gertz of Media Matters. Matt, thanks for coming on.

Matt Gertz: Good to be back.

Sargent: So things are going south for Trump on lots of fronts—Iran, the Supreme Court thwarting his plot to steal the election via vote by mail, racist GOP candidates outing themselves, and so forth. Fox has been quiet on a lot of these topics. You’ve coined this idea of “negative space” in Fox coverage. Tell us what that is.

Gertz: So I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking and writing about the stories that Fox News talks about, their particular obsessions, their tendency to puff up Donald Trump, their attacks on all of his enemies. But what I’ve been spending more time on lately is thinking about what I call the “negative space”—the stories that do not exist on Fox News, but are of a great deal of interest to people not only who don’t listen to Fox News, but who might be of interest if Fox were to level with their audience about what’s happening in the world. There’s been a series of these, in particular since the summer began, where there’s been an obvious interest in providing coverage, if this were in fact a news network, but Fox has been unable.

Sargent: You were pretty early on in noticing that Fox simply stopped talking about Iran, after functioning as really a twenty-four-seven propaganda outlet for the invasion. Walk us through what they’re doing on all these stories.

Gertz: Sure. Iran is a really clear case of this. Fox to a large extent helped get the country into this war in the first place. There was a great deal of very enthusiastic coverage from people like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin back in February, urging the president to go to war with Iran. There’s been reporting from behind the scenes that he was actually talking about some of these segments in the White House. We saw him use those segments on his social media platforms, trying to drive attention to them. I’ve talked for years about this feedback loop between Fox and Trump, and I think this was its most consequential test.

But a funny thing happened. The quick and easy war that all of these Fox stars were telling Donald Trump was on the table just didn’t materialize the way they expected it to. Somehow they were the only ones in American public life who were unaware that the counterattack for Iran is to close the Strait of Hormuz and shut down global trade in energy. And so when that happened, the network had a problem. And they just stopped talking about it altogether.

We tracked mentions of Iran on five of the most popular Fox News shows, the evening programs that the president watches that are so influential on the Republican Party. And we found that mentions of Iran fell 78 percent from June to August. They were down to, like, two mentions per episode, more or less. And this is just a huge decline across all the programs at the same time. They were suddenly no longer talking about an ongoing war that is currently sending the price of gasoline and diesel skyrocketing.

Sargent: I want to dwell a little bit on what Fox News means to Trump. So early on, when Fox is egging Trump on, Trump starts the invasion, Fox covers it glowingly. They’re pumping all this imagery of things going boom, boom, and........

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