Media Matters weekly newsletter, June 20

Welcome back to Media Matters’ weekly newsletter. This week:  

  • Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill threatens rural hospitals. Fox News personalities have falsely claimed immigrants are “bankrupting” them.
  • Trump’s Fox News obsession is driving the U.S. toward war with Iran.  
  • The right-wing media misinformation machine spun up a false story about the Minnesota shooting suspect. 

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  • This week in stupid

    Newsmax screenshot showing Trump as a king
    • Fox host Lawrence Jones: “If we ever even got into a conflict with Iran, it would be over within two days, if that.”
  • This week in scary

    • Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk praised Trump's “remigration” policy, a form of ethnic cleansing.
    • TikTok’s search engine is promoting anti-abortion propaganda when users search for information about medication abortions.
  • Excuse me?

    • Fox’s Jesse Watters: “I bet a bunch of guys that are dating illegal alien Spanish girls are like ICE, here’s the address! She hasn’t been very good.” 
    • Fox’s Sean Hannity called the “No Kings” protesters of last weekend “radical left-wing lunatics.” 
    • Podcaster Benny Johnson responded to the Minnesota killings last weekend by asking, “Is it a massive false flag?” 
    • News organizations are helping Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) rebrand as a working class ally.
  • Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill threatens rural hospitals. Fox News personalities have falsely claimed immigrants are “bankrupting” them.

    Fox News personalities have repeatedly accused immigrants of bankrupting hospitals, but new research shows that President Donald Trump’s proposed so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” is the real threat. 

    Analysis from KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation, found that the bill Trump and congressional Republicans are seeking to advance — which would slash Medicaid and other health care spending to cover tax cuts for the extremely wealthy — could decimate hospitals throughout the country, especially facilities with high proportions of Medicaid patients and those outside of urban centers. 

    Since Trump’s election, right-wing media have waged an all-out campaign to support Republicans' ongoing attempt to slash Medicaid. But in the year before Trump took office, Fox News personalities were falsely blaming immigrants for bankrupting hospitals and threatening patients' health care. 

    Media Matters’ John Knefel wrote this great piece explaining how Fox is falsely blaming immigrants for doing what Trump’s bill would accomplish. I invite you to read it here.

  • Trump’s Fox News obsession is driving the U.S. toward war with Iran

    Trump / Fox / Iran

    Citation

    Andrea Austria / Media Matters

    President Donald Trump appears to be careening toward a U.S. military strike on Iran as current and former Fox News figures — from posts on the network’s airwives, elsewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem, and within his administration — fight to influence his decision. 

    For years, Trump’s obsession with the Fox universe has driven policy decisions, administration staffing, and countless stream-of-consciousness social media posts. Now, the network will have an outsized role in determining America’s potential involvement in a spiraling regional military conflict. 

    George W. Bush’s administration spent months engaging in a meticulous and dishonest strategy to persuade the public of a fraudulent threat from Saddam Hussein before launching a war against Iraq in March 2003. That conflict resulted in the deaths of 4,000 U.S. service members and more than 200,000 Iraqi civilians. 

    Media Matters’ Matt Gertz sums this up well: “A bunch of current and former Fox News employees are essentially deciding whether the U.S. is going to war.” 

    Meanwhile, the broader right-wing media ecosystem is engaged in a dogfight over potential American involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict. Some figures, such as Fox’s Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, are arguing for U.S. intervention while others, such as Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, are cautioning against involvement. Media Matters prepared this great rundown of where the debate stands now.

  • The right-wing disinformation machine spins up a false profile of the Minnesota shooting suspect

    On June 14, Vance Boetler allegedly shot two Minnesota Democratic state lawmakers in their homes while impersonating law enforcement. Rep. Melissa Hortmand and her husband were killed, and Sen. John Hoffman and his wife are recovering from their injuries. While the public waited for more information about the suspect and his motives, right-wing media began to speculate wildly about Boetler, spinning a false narrative that he is a leftist figure aligned with Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz

    The evidence for this right-wing theory is scarce: Conservative media suggested Boetler killed Hortman for breaking from the Democrats on a recent vote to give undocumented immigrants health care. Some figures even speculated that Walz put a “political hit” out on the lawmakers in retaliation for their vote. The narrative snowballed over the weekend, culminating in a post from Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) suggesting that the shooter was a “Marxist.” 

    As more information surfaced, a very different picture emerged: The suspect left behind a “hit list” of 70 targets that included abortion providers and other Minnesota Democrats. The suspect’s friend described him as a supporter of President Donald Trump who enjoyed watching Alex Jones’ Infowars. Wired reported that Boetler is linked to evangelical ministries and is “president of Revoformation Ministries.” The report also said that the suspect has preached against abortion and the LGBTQ community. Additionally, he “liked” the right-wing legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom on Facebook. 

    By the time the actual facts emerged, the right’s reckless and conspiratorial speculation had done its job, muddying the waters with misinformation and claiming the shooter was a left-wing associate of Walz.