On MSNBC's Deadline White House, Angelo Carusone blasts Fox News for hiding the GOP's severe Medicaid cuts from its audience
Published
Citation
From the June 30, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): Millions of Americans are set to lose their health care thanks to Donald Trump's deeply unpopular domestic spending bill, one that could become law any day now. And many of these Americans might not even know it is coming, especially if they are regular viewers of Fox News. New study by Media Matters highlights the lengths Fox News is going to to distract their audience from these deeply unpopular cuts to programs like Medicaid. Media Matters identified 1,390 mentions of the word Medicaid on Fox's original programming from January 20 through June 21. Now by contrast, they found that the network mentioned Biden over 13,000 times during that period.
Joining our conversation, president of Media Matters for America, Angelo Carusone. Cornell is back with us. Alright Angelo, talk to me about this study. The fact that you have Fox News mentioning former president Biden at a rate of 10 to 1 in comparison to the term Medicaid. What does that tell you about where their attention is?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah. I mean, that's the old standby, right? Is that you deflect, right? You put most of your attention on something completely different so that the little bit of information -- and that's the part that's important here -- is that the little bit of information they do end up getting about the bill, the potential cuts to Medicaid, they also get to control that, right? Because that -- it's a lot easier to control a much sliver, much narrower story about what's being told about the cuts. So you give them a big piece of pie to focus on, and then the few other sort of side dishes, you also get to have influence and control over. And that's where this 10 to 1 advantage comes in.
And I think it's particularly in focus when you look at how the 8 PM hour, right at the beginning of primetime is covering it. Because, you know, that's Jesse Watters, and he has a 55 to 1 ratio on his program. So, that is the lead into the rest of the night, and it just goes to show you where the bulk and the focus of Fox's attention really is. And it seems to be working, right?
Because it is a fait accompli now largely within the larger, not just right-wing media space, but in Republican politics. They picked a lane here. They ended up being sort of the editor-in-chief or the assignment editor of what the story that was going to be told about this bill is, and that has largely filtered down. Obviously, the administration's political pressure put everybody else in line. But right now, they're filling a role that they haven't actually filled in quite a long time, which is they're the pied piper here.