• A Fox Business guest called for tariffs of 10% to 12%, saying “Everyone sort of pays a little bit more.”

Last Friday, The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken order to lethally attack a boat off the coast of Trinidad. “The order was to kill everybody,” a source told the Post. To comply with Hegseth’s order, the Navy special operations commander overseeing the September 2 attack ordered a second strike on the boat, after an initial hit left two survivors, and 11 people were killed in total. Following the revelations, leaders of the bipartisan House and Senate armed services committees issued statements promising inquiries into the report. 

Legal experts have argued that the killings could constitute a war crime. Even Newsmax’s senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano said the entire chain of command involved in the boat strike “should be prosecuted for a war crime.” 

Despite scattered criticisms, right-wing media have generally dismissed the accusations against Hegseth. Fox’s Jesse Watters called the story a “hoax” and Fox’s Greg Gutfeld said, “It’s just better for us to kill them in the ocean, make them shark feed, be done with it.” 

Amid the outrage directed toward the Pentagon and Hegseth, right-wing commentators seized on a New York Times report about the September 2 attack, claiming the article “DEBUNKED” the Washington Post’s report. In reality, the Times actually confirmed, rather than undermined, the Post’s account. I invite you to read Media Matters’ breakdown of the articles showing how wrong right-wing media are on this narrative. 

It’s worth noting here that Hegseth, before becoming secretary of defense, was a champion of war criminals. As a Fox News host in 2019, Hegseth defended an American soldier who admitted to the extrajudicial execution of an alleged Taliban bombmaker, saying, “If he committed premeditated murder … then I did as well. What do you think you do in war?” Hegseth also used his position at Fox to endorse presidential pardons for U.S. service members accused or convicted of war crimes.

• The Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro criticized Trump for pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez: “I just don’t understand the president’s logic here.” 
• Fox host Brian Kilmeade said US special envoy Steve Witkoff “likes Russia too much” and his actions are “totally unacceptable.” 
• Podcaster Tim Pool: “Trump seems to be going a little bit into the neoliberal. You know, neocon-neoliberal.” 
• Podcaster Tim Dillon criticized Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy: “Hey, Sean. No one has any money.”

Pete Hegseth’s very bad week intensified when a report from the Defense Department’s watchdog dismantled the excuses that Fox News offered for the Signalgate scandal. The scandal set off in March after The Atlantic reported that Hegseth had shared plans for an imminent U.S. strike against Houthi targets in Yemen on a Signal chain that included other top administration officials — and, inadvertently, Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg. 

The DOD inspector general concluded that the information Hegseth shared had been classified at the time he received it, and that sending the attack plans through unsecured networks had endangered U.S. national security and the lives of the military service members tasked to the mission. 

When Signalgate broke, Fox’s propagandists scrambled to downplay Hegseth’s actions. They denied that the information had been classified or that its transmission through unsecured channels carries risks and they mocked the notion that anything untoward had occurred beyond Goldberg's inclusion in the chain. These pitiful defenses were ridiculous at the time, but now the DOD inspector general appears to agree. 

It turns out there are downsides to promoting a second-tier Fox pundit best known for his defenses of alleged war criminals to lead the most powerful military in the history of the world.

• Daily Wire host Michael Knowles: “The African continent is rape culture.” 
• Newsmax host Carl Higbie said the Trump administration should ignore all federal judges except for those on the Supreme Court. 
• Newsmax host Rob Schmitt on Trump’s threats against Venezuela: “If it was about drugs, he’d be in Mexico right now, right?”

We warned last year that Trump’s second term as president would turbo-charge the political right’s burgeoning media-intimidation complex. Twelve months later, some corporate media owners have proved out point: They are damaging celebrated news outlets like CBS and The Washington Post out of some combination of personal preference and political expedience. While journalists at their outlets are still producing important stories that reveal the corruption and malfeasance of the Trump administration, it’s anyone’s guess how long they will be permitted to do so. 

During the past year, Trump has wielded the powers of his office to mold the nation’s news media. He has supplemented or replaced members of the traditional press corps with MAGA influencers and Trumpist outlets; defunded media outlets in the U.S.; sued reporters and news outlets; and terminated rules protecting journalists. He has also used state power as leverage against oligarchs who control broadcast and cable news and major newspapers. All of this is in pursuit of a cowed journalist corps that he hopes will produce Fox News-style propaganda venerating his successes and covering up his corruption and failures. 

Though there has been resistance to Trump’s authoritarian agenda, certain wealthy magnates have chosen the path of cowardice, submission, and collaboration. 

Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote this powerful piece detailing how media oligarchs are folding to Trump.