One topic Fox News relentlessly hyped has nearly vanished from primetime: analysis

In March, as the United States and Israel opened Donald Trump's war on Iran, Fox News couldn't stop talking about it. Six months later, with the conflict bogged down and increasingly unpopular, the network's biggest evening stars have nearly stopped mentioning it, according to a new Media Matters analysis.

The progressive watchdog counted references to "Iran" across five Fox evening "opinion" shows, The Five, The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime, Hannity, and Gutfeld!, and found they fell 78% from June to August, dropping from 801 mentions to just 178. In March, when the strikes began, those shows said "Iran" more than 2,300 times. Watters' program alone went from 258 mentions in June to 46 in August.

"... on Fox News — the MAGA propaganda network that urged Trump to attack Iran in the first place — some of his most devoted allies have all but completely stopped talking about it," the analysis noted.

The piece also flagged the topics rushed in to fill that deafening silence.

In August, Media Matters found, the five shows invoked "socialism" 730 times, the WNBA 238 times and Anthony Fauci 193 times, collectively about six times more often than the war itself.

Media Matters argued the retreat is strategic, as the war Fox hosts had cheered curdled into a fiasco that exacerbated economic pain and dragged on Republicans' hopes. Instead, the hosts fell back on familiar culture-war targets.

"I don't want to cover women's basketball," Watters groaned on The Five. "We have to do this again, really?"

It marked a remarkable turn from spring, when Laura Ingraham assured viewers, "Trump has already won in Iran." The analysis noted Hannity had helped lead the Fox hawks who urged Trump to strike in the first place.

The pivot aligns with Trump's own stark change of rhetoric. The president has instead leaned into wild warnings of communism as he fights to hold onto a narrow congressional majority in November's midterms.