Matthew Gertz

Fox News hiring the president's daughter-in-law is beyond parody

The idiotic meltdown over Politico Pro subscriptions is a perfect case study for the right's broken information ecosystem

Sean Hannity once celebrated the FBI “rank and file.” Now he’s touting Trump’s purge.

Fox News host Sean Hannity — President Donald Trump’s pick to provide his first Oval Office interview, which airs tonight — shattered every imaginable ethical standard during Trump’s first term as he transformed his program into a nonstop White House propagandafest.Hannity, long a consistent mouthpiece for GOP talking points and naked partisan cheerleading, became the sitting president’s confidant and adviser. The Fox star became known within the West Wing as Trump’s “unofficial chief of staff,” shaping policy outcomes and widespread conspiracy-minded counternarratives through both his private conversations with the president and his public program, which Trump regularly watched. Hannity’s on-air propaganda and unethical actions drew outrage from his colleagues, but his bosses were largely unconcerned with his dual role as network host and Trump political operative.Hannity didn’t stop propagandizing on Trump’s behalf when he left the White House in disgrace in 2021. The host work

The right’s propaganda machine gets its Jan. 6 pardons

New Orleans truck attack restarts the Fox-Trump feedback loop

Misinformer of the Year: Anti-media intimidation

Kari Lake, Trump’s VOA pick, hates the “fake news” — and called Fox a “globalist network”

Then-President Donald Trump repeatedly favored the Fox News hosts and guests he saw on his television screen over federal health policy experts as he managed the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and it had calamitous consequences. He's going even further as he prepares for his second term, picking familiar faces from the right-wing propaganda network to run the government health bureaucracy.Trump, a Fox obsessive, staffed his first administration with at least 20 former Fox personalities, and he continues to rely on that method as he stocks his second one. But the network’s dominance among Trump’s announced picks to carry out his second-term health policy is nonetheless striking.Anti-vaccine activist and Fox hero Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He will potentially oversee former Fox contributor Dr. Marty Makary at the Food and Drug Administration, Fox medical contributor Dr. Janette Nesheiwat as U.S. surgeon general, and frequent Fox guests Dr. Jay Bh

Fox News dominated wide swaths of federal decision-making during Donald Trump’s first presidency, as his administration effectively merged with the right-wing propaganda network that had propelled him to power. It’s currently unclear how the battle for Trump’s attention will shake out in a second one — but here’s how his media diet influenced the U.S. government the last time he was in the White House.Trump owed his 2016 political ascent to that right-wing media ecosystem. A longtime Fox regular, he was obsessed with the network’s programming and channeled its demagoguery on the campaign trail, winning over its audience, as well as upstart alt-right organs like Steve Bannon’s Breitbart.com. He dominated Fox’s airtime on the way to his primary campaign win, bending the network and the GOP to his will before garnering a narrow Electoral College majority.Once Trump was in office, Fox became a state TV outlet that lavished him with praise and denounced his foes, and in doing so it gained unpr