two weeks before Tucker Carlson was fired, I was with Abughazaleh and five of his Media Matters colleagues in their Navy Yard office overlooking the Anacostia River to watch them watch late-night Fox News programming. The space is huge, with open seating and large conference rooms, and very few employees. (Most of the team has worked from home since the pandemic began.)
Blonde, blue-eyed and petite, Abughazaleh could easily pass for one of Fox News’ talking heads. In fact, Abughazaleh has a pretty good idea of what it would take to become the right-wing favorite on one of the shows she follows daily. “Rant about cancel culture on Twitter, do some ‘I’m with JK Rowling’ tweet, escalate it over and over again,” he said. “Complain, rinse and repeat.
“It’s very easy and requires a lot of money, which is why so many people do it,” he continued. “All you have to do is complain and be a little racist. To be clear, I’d rather gouge my eyes out.”
Abughazaleh joked that he was born to be a “conservative sleeper agent.” He grew up in an “affluent” area of Dallas and attended private schools until his sophomore year of high school. Her father is a Palestinian immigrant and she is a seventh-generation Texan on her mother’s side. His conservative household regularly tuned into Fox News.
As a child, Abughazaleh also watched her maternal grandmother, a long time member of the Texas Federation of Republican Women, worked on multiple Republican campaigns and listened to their enthusiastic descriptions of the party’s ideology. (After her grandmother’s death, Abughazaleh inherited the mink coat she wore to President Nixon’s inauguration.)
Abughazaleh was a Republican until her teens. She attributes her progressive political awakening to her move to Tucson, Arizona, during those years. “At least half of my high school was for low-income or undocumented people,” he says. “The bootstrap myth was simply shattered before my eyes.”
He attended George Washington University in Washington, DC, during Donald Trump’s years in office, and majored in international security in addition to studying journalism. Upon graduating in 2020, he 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 to care about what I do.” The position at Media Matters was perfect for her.
Media issues describes himself as a “progressive information and research center” dedicated to “comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the American media.” The group’s website archives footage from television shows and online broadcasts alike, which it uses to track false narratives or draw attention to how certain topics are covered.
Part of Abughazaleh’s job is to extract television clips of Fox News moments from his assigned shows and send the transcripts to his colleagues so they can keep track of what is being said about a wide range of topics on the cable news channel.
Unlike some of his colleagues, who use multiple desktop monitors, Abughazaleh does all his work on a laptop. He flicks between tabs at lightning speed, sending emails, posting clips to Twitter, and firing off scathing responses to people in his mentions.
The night I saw her at work, one of the first segments she caught was Carlson’s.wildly racist rant” about Tennessee state politician Justin Pearson. “You’re here for a fun night,” he said while exporting the clip of Carlson’s opening monologue. “Strong stuff: He’s having a normal night today.”
Media Matters employees are sometimes criticized for spreading problematic content by posting clips from Fox News. Abughazaleh sees it differently. “Fox is the most watched cable news channel in the country,” Abughazaleh said. “They already had the platform. And just letting them get by without problems does more harm than help.”
