Media Matters weekly newsletter, November 8
Written by Jason Campbell
Published
Welcome back to Media Matters’ weekly newsletter. This week:
- The MAGA propaganda machine helped carry Trump to the White House — and it’s not done poisoning America.
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This week in stupid
- Tucker Carlson blamed abortion for hurricanes.
This week in scary
- Fox News’ Dana Perino and Greg Gutfeld suggested “the death penalty” for Trump prosecutors.
- Project 2025 partner blog: “‘Revenge’ can also be a good vehicle for public policy.”
- Steve Bannon: “Rough Roman justice” is coming for media companies like NBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
Excuse me?
- Fox’s Brit Hume said January 6 and democracy are “a BS issue.”
- Fox News and Project 2025 contributor Thomas Homan: If Trump “needs help running a deportation operation, I am standing by.”
- Steve Bannon: “If you’re not prepared to have them throw you in a prison” then you won’t be part of “taking our country back.”
Four years after fomenting an attempted coup and leaving the White House in disgrace, convicted felon Donald Trump was reelected president on Tuesday. He owes his return to the presidency at least in part to a rankly dishonest right-wing information ecosystem that helped carry him through countless scandals that would have ended the careers of most politicians, driving his comeback to the pinnacle of power.
Conservative audiences are dependent on a right-wing media complex that bombards them with falsehoods and grievances while dissuading them from consulting any alternative sources of information. During Trump’s first term, that bubble served him and his interests. Within it, his supporters were convinced by a sprawling conspiracy theory portraying the then-president as the victim of a shadowy “deep state” cabal that justified mass retribution.
During the election, right-wing propagandists worked to hold the GOP base together with a combination of grievance-mongering and silence. They flooded the zone with a bogus narrative of “migrant crime,” instructed their audiences to treat immigrants as scapegoats, and lashed out at the press. When an unprecedented string of former Republican officials (including Trump’s own former administration aides) came forward with dire warnings of what Trump did in his first term and could do in a second, they hid the news from their audience.
As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz writes: “Journalists and political strategists will spend the next weeks and months grappling for explanations as to how Trump returned to the White House. But without the support of the right-wing propaganda machine, he would not have been in position to sweep his party’s nomination in the first place — and in an evenly divided country amid a global anti-incumbent wave, that provided a strong position to win the presidency. Now, the same propagandists who helped him back to power are poised to help him carry out his extreme agenda of destruction and retribution.”
In case you missed it
- Media Matters President Angelo Carusone and Molly Jong-Fast discussed how American discourse is “pickled in misinformation and right-wing rage.”
- Multiple states have enacted legislation or executive orders with restrictions or provisions that overlap with Project 2025’s goals, offering case studies of the harm that the playbook could unleash on a federal level.
- Fox News neglected to cover reporting about the deaths of two women in Texas who sought abortion care during medical emergencies.
- Fox News has been misinforming its viewers about abortion.
- In the weeks leading up to the election, top print newspapers were covering Donald Trump on the front page considerably more than Kamala Harris.
- In 2024, the big three corporate broadcast TV news outlets routinely failed to adequately cover the policies at stake in the election.