sit on this curvy couch
and deliver a bizarre mix of internet conspiracy theories,
Sharia law is now changing everything.
general absurdity,
Nickelodeon is pushing a global warming agenda.
And whatever the hell is going on here.
It's the Fox show that's so bad you can't help but laugh at it.
Can we get a stick?
Anybody got a stick?
What a bunch of dopes.
It's all a lot of fun.
Or at least it used to be.
Because now, these three geniuses are some of President Trump's
most trusted advisers.
Fox & Friends in the morning, they're very honorable people.
That's not coming from me, that's coming from Trump,
who recently called Fox & Friends one of the most influential shows in news.
And the scary thing is he's not wrong.
Right now I'm getting my daily intelligence briefing.
Oh, from who?
From you guys.
To truly understand the magic of Fox & Friends, you need to watch it every single day.
But my therapist says I'm not allowed to do that anymore,
so I got someone who is.
Did you know there's seven days of Fox & Friends.
A lot of people think it's only five days.
No, there's a weekend edition too.
It's a lot.
It's a lot of Fox & Friends.
This is Matt Gertz.
He's a research fellow at a progressive media watchdog group
called Media Matters.
Full disclosure: He also used to be my boss, so.
Well, this is awkward.
On the morning of October 10, 2017, Gertz noticed something weird happening.
Trump tweeted this, at 8 o'clock in the morning, praising a book by a little-known conservative
author, seemingly out of nowhere.
So I thought that was weird.
One of my colleagues pointed out to me that the author had actually been on Fox & Friends
earlier that morning.
His colleague was right.
Trump seemed to be responding to a Fox & Friends segment about the book
that had aired that morning.
So I looked at all the tweets from that morning.
I had pretty good matches.
Fox & Friends talked about the NFL protests.
Three minutes later, Trump tweeted about the NFL protests.
Fox & Friends criticized Democrats over immigration.
Trump tweeted about Democrats and immigration.
I said, "Well, damn.
He's watching the show and tweeting about what he sees."
Gertz started tracking every time a Fox & Friends segment lined up with a Trump tweet.
And he found a ton of examples.
Fox & Friends goes after Andrew McCabe.
So does Trump.
Fox & Friends talks about protests in Iran.
So does Trump.
Fox & Friends talks about Trump's mental fitness.
And, yeah.
The list goes on and on.
Sometimes Trump copies language directly from what he sees on screen,
quoting Fox & Friends chyrons verbatim.
Other times, he tags Fox & Friends in his tweet.
I counted over 50 examples of him doing this since his inauguration
because I need a hobby.
If you look at the frequency of Trump's tweets in 2017,
there's a spike between 6 o'clock and 9 o'clock AM,
which is Fox & Friends' time slot.
And Fox & Friends has noticed, too.
They now casually joke about the president watching them live.
When I asked the president to blink the lights on and off if he's watching...
And because they know he's watching, Fox & Friends has evolved from
a show that
to a show that
actively trying to influence his behavior.
A Vox study of 17 months of Fox & Friends transcripts
found that, after the election, sentences aimed at instructing or advising
Trump spiked by more than 50 percent.
I think the next thing the president should do
is start doing some infrastructure.
That same study found that the show was using more language aimed at changing the president's
behavior; phrases like "we need to," "we are going,"
and "we have got."
What does the president need to do, if he's listening this morning,
to change the narrative?
Jesus, how is this even real?
Okay, power through.
You saw this feedback loop in full effect during the debate over the recent FISA bill.
In early January, Republicans were widely in support
of reauthorizing a sweeping government surveillance measure,
and the White House had publicly come out in support of it.
But on January 11, Fox & Friends ran this segment,
warning that the bill could be used to spy on Trump officials.
At one point during the segment, Andrew Napolitano turns to the camera and says:
Mr. President, this is not the way to go.
You can probably guess what happens next.
Trump sends a tweet criticizing the bill, literally quoting the caption of the Fox & Friends
segment, Republicans on the Hill spend several hours
panicking. It is a bit of a confusing morning, to say
the least.
and two hours later Trump backtracks, saying he still supports
the bill.
When asked if Fox & Friends got to Trump, press secretary Sarah Sanders decides
to make fun of CNN instead.
I'm sure you're disappointed he's not watching CNN.
Ooooh!
All of this has given Fox & Friends incredible power to
to talk about sideshows that would otherwise never escape the Fox News bubble.
What you have is Fox & Friends doing stories, the president tweeting about what he's seeing,
and the rest of the media going, "The president just tweeted this bizarre thing,
now we need to talk about this."
Trump watches a dumb segment about missing FBI texts,
tweets about it, and it becomes the top story of the day.
Trump watches a dumb segment about the British spying on him,
repeats the claim in public, and sparks an international crisis.
That was a statement made by a very talented lawyer on Fox.
That's a lot of power in the hands of a show that's known for getting things wrong.
A show that peddles wild internet conspiracy theories,
Secret society, the missing texts, it all adds up.
embraces paranoid fear-mongering,
What, we'll annihilate North Korea after we're dead?
I mean, we have to do something now.
and launches smear campaigns
against Trump's political opponents.
Bob Mueller, we now know, is totally conflicted.
Jim Comey is totally conflicted.
It is a carnival of chaos.
These are not the people that you want doing the show that the president of the United States
is watching every morning.
Unfortunately, we don't have much of a choice.
Fox & Friends has spent years being treated like a big joke.
But thanks to Trump, these three might be the ones who get the
last laugh.
While we were shooting this episode, Fox & Friends posted a job opening for a head writer.
They’re looking for somebody with a passion for current events and accuracy.
So, it’s been fun, Vox, but it’s time for me to follow my dreams.