2018 event flyer from the Steamboat Institute

Shannon Bream, a Fox News anchor who is part of the network’s purported “news division," appeared at a conservative event months ahead of the 2018 midterm elections and praised the Republican tax bill because “everybody wants to keep more money” in their paychecks. She also said that President Donald Trump has been “rolling back regulations that we've heard from businesses, from the IRS to the EPA, have made it tougher for them to survive and be profitable in America.”

Bream spoke on August 11 at the Steamboat Institute’s 10th Annual Freedom Conference & Festival. The two-day event also featured then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and conservative commentators Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, and Sebastian Gorka, among others.

The Steamboat Institute is a Colorado-based conservative nonprofit. It stated in its 2018 annual report that the conference “provides attendees with an unparalleled opportunity to meet and mingle with the speakers, who include nationally recognized leaders in conservative thought and policy.”

Its national advisory board includes Ginni Thomas, a conservative writer who is married to Justice Clarence Thomas, and Kevin Jackson, who was fired from Fox News after he said the women who reported sexual misconduct by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh are “lying skanks.”

The institute is part of the State Policy Network (SPN), a coalition of organizations that pushes for conservative policies across the country. Industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch have funded SPN.

During her speech, Bream praised the recently passed Republican tax bill, stating that everyone gets “some kind of benefit” from the plan and that “everybody wants to keep more money of their paychecks.” From her speech:

SHANNON BREAM: The Heritage Foundation has done an interesting study on this. They crunched the numbers and they found this, quote: “Every taxpayer, average taxpayer, in every state, and in every congressional district will see a tax cut in 2018.” And this: “Households will save an average of $1,400; married couples with two children will save $2,917." They’ve got a very cool graphic if you’ve been on their website. If you’ve seen this study, it lights up -- it lets you click on different districts and states to see how the tax cuts in the original package would benefit you, and there’s not a single district that you can click on that doesn’t have some kind of benefit. I pointed this out on my show a couple of weeks ago when the study came out, and I got heat for being partisan, and I thought, ‘I think everybody wants to keep more money of their paychecks.’ I don’t know that -- I’m in the news division, I don’t have an opinion publicly, we all have opinions -- but I don’t think saying that people get to keep more of their own money is a bad thing? Am I wrong?  

As Vox’s Emily Stewart wrote, “The 2017 tax bill cut taxes for most Americans, including the middle class, but it heavily benefits the wealthy and corporations.” 

Bream also said that Trump has been “rolling back regulations that we've heard from businesses, from the IRS to the EPA, have made it tougher for them to survive and be profitable in America.”

Several months later, Bream interviewed Zinke on the November 29 edition of her program Fox News @ Night (Zinke resigned in mid-December under a cloud of ethical problems).

Bream is a member of Fox’s purported “news division,” which the network points to when touting its alleged objectivity (in reality, the “news” and opinion sides are both cogs in the same propaganda machine). This year, she was scheduled to speak at an event alongside Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis for the James Madison Institute, a nonprofit conservative group that has been funded by the Koch brothers and has praised Republicans. Shortly after Media Matters reported on the event, the organization announced that “Bream has had to cancel her appearance at our annual dinner.”