On SiriusXM’s The Michelangelo Signorile Show, Matt Gertz discusses how Fox is sticking with Trump on Iran as some in right-wing media turn against him
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Matt Gertz discusses the Iran war and Fox News with Michelangelo Signorile
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From the May 14, 2026, edition of SiriusXM's The Michelangelo Signorile Show
MICHELANGELO SIGNORILE (HOST): Why do you think Fox is doing this at this moment in time, knowing that a lot of their audience is really unhappy with the war? I mean, we're seeing the war in Iran, it is more unpopular than any war in the last 76 years. I mean, it's cutting across parties. Yeah, Republicans are more supportive than Democrats or independents, but it's really bad. A lot of the people who watch Fox know it's bad. And yet instead of like seeing where their audience is, they're trying to convince their audience of something that a lot of the audience doesn't believe.
MATT GERTZ (MEDIA MATTERS): I think that's not quite right. I think that Fox is where their audience is right now. If you look at the polling on support for the war, you know, belief in whether it was a good idea, approval of Trump's handling of the war, what you end up with is a scenario where about 60% of the public is turning against it, but 80% of the Republicans are still with him. And so if you're Fox News, you have a lot of overhead. You're paying a lot of people. You have a lot riding on the successes of Donald Trump and on the audience that believes that he is doing a great job.
And so, you know, I think back to late 2020 when after Donald Trump lost the election and claimed that he had actually won it, Fox News for a few days wasn't playing ball with those claims and then Trump went nuts basically and said that the network had betrayed him and lots of people who watched Fox News started turning it off, switching to competitors like OAN, like Newsmax.
And so what happened, as we saw in the filings in the Dominion lawsuit, where Dominion Voting Systems, a voting technology company, sued Fox News because the network had been repeatedly falsely claiming that it had switched votes and rigged the election against Donald Trump. We saw in the filings in that lawsuit Fox News executives and hosts behind the scenes saying, oh my God, our viewers are furious. They are turning us off. We need to get back in their good graces. We need to support the president if we're going to survive this. And so I think that it was a near death experience for people at Fox News, and their takeaway was that they can't get on the wrong side of Donald Trump and of his supporters. So right now it's an 80 to 20 issue among Republicans. Fox is sticking with the 80%.
You do see on the other hand, some of what I call the Fox diaspora, people like Tucker Carlson, people like Megyn Kelly, who are making a play for the other 20%, perhaps betting that that side will grow over time.
SIGNORILE: And maybe that's what I was thinking about how they seem to be very worried about their particular viewers or followers and where they're going.
GERTZ: Yes, absolutely, and I think the way that plays out is with what I was talking about, about how they do so much happy talk and the president is watching it, is that he's being convinced that he can't back down, that he has done something great, that he needs to escalate, if anything, to finish the job. That's what he's being told by all these people on Fox News. And so as the war becomes more and more unpopular, he is more and more wedded to it and unable to pivot away from it because all of the people that he trusts on Fox are telling him that that's what he should be doing.