This is a special, members-only edition of OMNISHAMBLES, a weekly podcast by The Daily Beast hosted by Jackie Kucinich, Sam Stein, and Asawin Suebsaeng. Want to make sense of the chaos in Trump-era Washington? Subscribe and listen to Omnishambles on Apple Podcasts.
This week, we discussed, in granular, graphic detail, how Fox News (particularly the morning show Fox & Friends) maintains an iron grasp on Donald Trump’s Twitter page, and how this can, and has, dramatically affected policymaking and behind-the-scenes operations in the age of Trump. And we break it down with someone in the media-watchdog business who monitors and tracks “@realDonaldTrump” relationship with his TV set and DVR more closely than perhaps anyone else online today.
This week’s guest: Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and an avid chronicler of President Trump’s obsession with, and frenetic live-tweeting of, Fox News and cable news. Find him on Twitter at @MattGertz.
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Gertz, on his daily tracking of where Trump tweets come from: “That was when I decided this was actually a bigger story than I think people had thought. There was a sort of sense that from time to time the president was watching television, from time to time he was tweeting, sometimes they matched up. What I started doing was on a daily basis, checking the president’s tweets against cable news programming... So that became my beat in the Trump administration. What is the president tweeting about, and is it Fox News—because it probably is.”
Why this actually matters—beyond laughing at the president’s TV habits: “Even someone like Jeanine Pirro, who historically is, I would say, a third or fourth tier Fox News personality, has had her profile raised dramatically, by virtue of the fact that the president of the United States takes her calls, and invites her to the White House... She is someone who has a great deal of influence on policymaking and how the president reacts to the Mueller probe.”
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