Transcript: Fox Accidentally Wrecks Trump’s Spin as Tariff Panic Grows
We heard a preview of this as the stock market was tanking over the last few weeks. They said, OK, there’s a little bit of pain, but there is something beautiful on the other side, or, Yes, there’s pain now, but this pain was caused by the Democrats and their spending policies, or, This pain was caused by immigrants who were taking your jobs, or they’ll just distract with the invasion of Canada and Greenland. There are ways that authoritarian governments keep control over their people, even during periods of extreme economic crisis—and, in fact, are able to consolidate their power and their propaganda instruments in periods of extreme economic crisis. So that’s why Fox News is particularly important to watch in the months and the years ahead: They are a key source of message control for a government that is trying to control basically everything.
Sargent: I want to try to close on a slightly optimistic note, which is this: The tariff story, I think, illustrates that the press in this country actually remains robust and independent. If you look at the polls, we’ve actually seen a significant shift in public opinion against the tariffs. And the reason for that, I think, was mainly press coverage and noise from the opposition, meaning the Democratic Party. It just looks to me like the press actually did a decent job of informing the voters of what tariffs really are—that they’re actually a tax, not other countries paying tribute to Donald Trump’s greatness or whatever. So you’ve got Fox News, as you say, functioning as authoritarian state media, but at the same time, its influence is actually somewhat limited precisely because the rest of the press, despite Trump’s threats and his shakedowns and all the rest of it, has actually been informative and robust and independent. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Hemmer: The thing that has been so fascinating about the tariff story is it’s reminder that the economy is one of those issues where journalists feel like they can actually tell the truth. They won’t do it on what they see as culture-war issues. They won’t do it on what they see as purely political issues. But when it comes to things like tariffs and the stock market crashing and the structure of the global economy, they feel like they can tell the truth about that. And when they do, it matters. You also see Democrats stepping up and talking about whether it’s oligarchy or the cost of the tariffs. And I think it’s that combination.