A key force in the populist MAGA media, former Trump campaign chief and White House aide Steve Bannon, has turned his opposition to bombing Iran into a fierce challenge to Fox News. Bannon began his show Friday with a montage of pro-war voices, promising his audience that it would make their “heads explode,” and he and his guests repeatedly attacked the network as “propaganda.”
“People on the right are now confronting an unpleasant reality, a great unmasking: The Murdochs don’t put America’s interests first,” Bannon told Semafor Sunday. “There needs to be a thorough FARA investigation into Fox’s relationship with a foreign power.” He added that “their audience is geriatrics — it’s people 70 and over,” and that Fox has “no stroke because it’s not an activist base.”
A Fox spokesperson declined to respond to the provocation, and there’s zero evidence for his implication that Fox is a paid Israeli proxy. The network has broadly offered positive coverage of the attack and the president, but has also given space to skepticism. But Bannon, who aired chatter Saturday morning predicting the coming attack, speaks to a large audience of right-wing activists and may offer Trump a valuable counterweight to the powerful cable network.
Trump’s friendly lunch with Bannon last week makes sense in this context: Fox’s ratings have soared as the rest of cable news declines, but the network is ever-sensitive to challenges from the right, and the president is always looking for leverage. (A curiosity: Bannon’s War Room, distributed on Real America’s Voice, Rumble, Spotify, and elsewhere, is still banned from YouTube over a vivid 2020 remark. But as the MAGA right has pivoted against the war, ideologies have scrambled, and Bannon’s show has hosted journalists from The Guardian and Axios.)