Staff Reports
A hidden-camera sting released by James O’Keefe’s O’Keefe Media Group has detonated inside Fox News Media, capturing a senior manager boasting about running thousands of dollars in strip-club charges on a corporate card and describing how those charges were disguised as business entertainment. The raw footage, if authentic, shows a level of contempt for rules and taxpayers that should alarm every investor and viewer who trusts big media to follow the law and basic decency.
The man identified in the clip, Jason Hermes, is not some low-level flunky but a named vice president at FOX Weather who joined the network in September 2024, according to Fox News’ own announcement. This is not a garden-variety HR problem; this is an allegation about a trusted executive who oversees major advertising relationships and revenue streams.
In the tape Hermes is heard bragging that when he “brings in 90 million” no one will question expenses and that staff would “just…lie on the expense reports,” a casual admission that strikes at the heart of corporate oversight and fiduciary duty. If those words are true, they’re proof of a two-tier system where the elite treat corporate money like a personal slush fund while ordinary Americans get audited for far less.
Conservative taxpayers should not be surprised but they should be furious: we are repeatedly lectured about accountability, transparency, and ethics by the media class, and yet these same gatekeepers appear to operate under different rules. This scandal is emblematic of the larger rot when institutions protect insiders and hide behind PR lines rather than doing the hard work of discipline and reform.
Beyond the moral outrage, there are concrete legal and tax issues at stake: federal tax law disallows deductions for entertainment that is essentially frivolous or not properly substantiated, and the IRS rules require careful documentation for business expenses. Misclassifying personal entertainment as client business could expose a company to audit risk, tax liabilities, and legal headaches that shareholders will not forgive.
O’Keefe’s team says they reached out to Hermes and that Fox News Media had not offered a full public explanation at the time of the release, and silence from corporate communications only deepens the suspicion that this is being downplayed. When a major media brand fails to own up quickly and transparently, it sends the wrong signal: protect the brand and the insiders first, admit nothing, and hope the outrage fades.
This moment calls for old-fashioned accountability: boards, auditors, and federal regulators should be asking for the receipts and the policies that allowed this to happen. Conservatives who believe in the rule of law and honest markets should demand swift investigations, private-sector audits, and real consequences if there was willful deception. The American people deserve answers, and the elite must learn that privilege does not grant immunity from responsibility.
