Fox News Host’s Admission Reveals Exactly How the MAGA Media Ecosystem Works — And Undermines Network’s Standing

Jesse Watters appeared to let the cat out of the bag Monday afternoon during an episode of The Five, revealing precisely how the pro-Trump MAGA media ecosystem effectively operates. But while he may not have intended to, his description ended up being a pretty stunning indictment of Fox News’ standing as a news outlet along the way.

Speaking on The Five on Monday night, Watters went off on the traditional or legacy media ecosystem, arguing it’s mired in an old-school, top-down approach that, in his view, has failed to keep up with a rapidly evolving media landscape. And to be fair, his description was largely accurate, though his framing was starkly alarming, arguing that he and, ostensibly, his colleagues at Fox News were waging a “grassroots guerilla warfare” campaign against his partisan enemies:

We are waging a 21st-century information warfare campaign against the left, and they are using tactics from the 1990s. They are holding tiny presser conferences, tiny little rallies. They are screaming into the ether on MSNBC. This is what you call top-down command and control. You’ve got the talking points from a newspaper, and you put it on the broadcast network, and then it disappears. What you are seeing on the right is asymmetrical – it’s grassroots guerrilla warfare.

But when Watters broke down precisely how the information ecosystem works, he did his employer no favors. He accurately explained how random or anonymous users on X can flag over the top and often false news stories to President Donald Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, whose amplification kickstarts a chain of messengers from Joe Rogan to Fox News. Watters described it as:

Someone said something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it. It is free money, and we are actually talking about expressing information.

It’s not clear what he means by “free money.” Still, it’s difficult not to see a clear connection between the lucrative business model based on often false reports, drives outrage, and keeps viewers tuning in — despite all too many examples revealing that the business model is based on lies.

And one doesn’t need to go very far to find examples…like the $50 Million in federal money earmarked for condoms in Gaza that we learned about ad nauseum on Fox News. Turns out? It’s a false story. 

Another great example? The bullshit story that migrants in Springfield were eating cats and dogs that Musk irresponsibly amplified. It got far too much attention for a story that was literally based on nothing but rumor and innuendo, but that didn’t keep Watters from asking a guest from Springfield about it in the most feckless way imaginable: “Is that even true?”

“Is that even true?” is not a question that should ever be asked about something so divisive and inflammatory by a reputable cable news host, but…here we are.

There are loads of other examples like DEI pilots causing air traffic problems, Border Truck convoys, and the “Worse than Watergate” story pegged to a false report that Special Counsel John Durham found that Hillary Clinton spied on the Trump campaign. For days, we heard this was the most corrupt story ever — until Durham weighed in publicly to insist that this was entirely unfounded.

Of course, the biggest whopper of all was Fox News’s promotion of election interference, which led to a stunning $785 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems and stilted on-air segments clearing the air to try to avoid a similar result with Smartmatic.

Watch above via YouTube.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.