Two weeks ago Tucker Carlson was fired, and I spent time with Abu-Ghazaleh and five Media Matters colleagues in their Navy Yard office overlooking the Anacostia River to watch them watch the evening Fox News show. The space is huge, with open seating and large conference rooms – and very few staff. (Most team members have worked from home since the pandemic began.)
Abu Ghazaleh, blonde, blue-eyed, and petite, could easily look like one of the Fox News panellists. In fact, Abu-Ghazaleh has a good idea of what it would take to become a darling of the right on one of the shows she watches daily. “The hype about cancel culture on Twitter, post some tweets that say ‘I stand with JK Rowling,’ and escalate it over and over again,” she said. “Complain, rinse, and repeat.
“It’s very easy, and it’s a lot of money, which is why a lot of people do it,” she continued. “All you have to do is complain and be a little racist. To be clear, I’d rather rip my eyeballs out.”
Abu-Ghazaleh joked that she was born to be a “conservative sleeper agent.” She grew up in a “well-to-do” area of Dallas and attended private schools until her sophomore year of high school. Her father is a Palestinian immigrant, and she is a seventh-generation Texan on her mother’s side. Their conservative family regularly watched Fox News.
When Abu-Ghazaleh was a child, she watched her maternal grandmother – A Long time member From the Texas Federation of Republican Women – I worked on multiple GOP campaigns and heard her glowing descriptions of the party’s ideology. (After her grandmother’s death, Abu-Ghazaleh inherited the mink fur coat she wore to President Nixon’s inauguration.)
Abu-Ghazaleh was a Republican until she was a teenager. She attributes her progressive political awakening to her move to Tucson, Arizona, during those years. “At least half of my high school was low-income or undocumented,” she says. “The bootstrap myth has been shattered before my eyes.”
She attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C. during the years of Donald Trump’s presidency, majoring in international security in addition to studying journalism. Upon graduating in 2020, she said, “I wanted to work for an organization that was aligned with a good mission, a mission that I believed in, and I didn’t want to work somewhere that was just a job — I wanted care around what I was doing.” The position at Media Matters was perfect for her.
Media matters He describes himself As a “progressive research and information center” dedicated to “comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the American media.” The group’s website archives footage from both television shows and online broadcasts, which it uses to track false narratives or draw attention to how certain issues are covered.
Part of Abu-Ghazaleh’s job is to pull television clips of Fox News moments from her assigned programs and send the transcripts to her colleagues so they can follow what is being said about a wide range of topics on the satellite news channel.
Unlike some of her colleagues who use multiple desktop screens, Abu-Ghazaleh does all of her work on a laptop. She jumps from tab to tab at lightning speed, sending emails, posting clips on Twitter, and launching snarky responses to people she mentions.
In the evening, I watched her at work, and one of the first clips she caught was Carlson’s.Violently racist screaming“You’re here for a fun night,” she said while exporting the clip of Carlson’s opening monologue. “Strong stuff — he’s having a rough go of it today.”
Media Matters employees are sometimes criticized for displaying problematic content by posting clips from Fox News. Abu-Ghazaleh sees the matter differently. “Fox is the most watched news channel in the country,” Abu-Ghazaleh said. “They already had the platform. Just letting them go unpunished does more harm than it helps.”