A picture of Tucker Carlson and other Fox News anchors at the company’s headquarters in New York in 2019. BRENDAN MCDERMID (Portal)
A defamation lawsuit against Fox News, the major Republican media mouthpiece, is revealing the true attitudes of employees at the prime-time television network on 2020 voter fraud allegations unsubstantiated by Donald Trump right wing media banners about good and bad or at least fact checking. Testimonies from magnate Rupert Murdoch, owner of the chain, show that many Fox News announcers knowingly spread Trump’s lies, although they later privately lamented, as did Tucker Carlson, the star TV evangelist, who five times reported negative news about the Republican (“I hate him passionately,” he once wrote in a message). Murdoch has even wondered if the network hasn’t gone too far in its election coverage.
Trump allegiance squirts down the chain, in a controversy also fueled by House Speaker Republican Kevin McCarthy’s exclusive grant to Carlson, during which time he has provided more than 41,000 hours of unreleased Capitol camera footage presented the attack by a horde of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. The broadcast of the first videos at the beginning of the week drove Carlson up again.
Court documents from voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems’ 2021 lawsuit against Fox News describe the nervousness in a struggling newsroom dealing with Trump’s claims that the election was stolen. The result is a deep rift between moderators and pollsters — in many cases both profiles match in the same person — and staffers who deeply disagree with Trump’s allegations and even the misinformation the chain would have suffered had it accepted some dubious facts as true be skeptical about.
In a private text exchange two weeks after Election Day, Tucker Carlson and fellow prime-time hosts Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity were upset that the network was the first to concede victory to Joe Biden that same Election Night, a decision the disgruntled part of the very conservative crowd. “We dedicated our lives to building an audience and they left it to Chris Wallace and the damn Leland Vittert to tear it apart,” Carlson wrote, referring to information provided that same evening by two colleagues who are no longer are in the company. Another former worker who was the head of the Washington office on election day has described what happened then as the chain’s “existential crisis”. “In the 22 years that I’ve been associated with Fox, this is the best I’ve seen of an existential crisis, at least journalistically,” the journalist said during the investigation.
Murdoch himself was self-deprecating, wondering aloud whether Ingraham and Hannity might have “gone too far” in their coverage of alleged voter fraud, according to another email included in the exhibits of the defamation lawsuit, for which Dominion 1, calls for $6 billion. The voice recording company considered its reputation in question following statements by Fox News about alleged tampering of its devices in favor of Biden.
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“Is it undeniable that key voices at Fox fed the story that the election was stolen and January 6th was a significant opportunity to overturn the outcome? maybe they are [Hannity] and Laura [Ingraham] they went too far too far. It’s great that Sean told you he was desperate for Trump, but what did he say to his viewers?” Murdoch asked rhetorically in an email.
The 6,600 pages of court documents released Tuesday show how things were seething in the Fox News engine room on election night November 8, 2020: things like the rush to award states to one of the candidates, like crucial Arizona, which Biden eventually took with a difference by about 10,000 votes. The documents reveal a chorus of voices, from top executives to producers, who share their doubts about the credibility of the voter fraud allegations. Also on the impact that the adoption of the same would have on the reputation of the chain.
To further fuel the controversy, Fox News earlier this week aired some of the previously unreleased videos of the attack on the Capitol that spokesman McCarthy Carlson provided. The Fox News star anchor is an “uncredible” news source, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said, drawing criticism from Capitol Police itself for the “misleading and distorted” picture Fox gave of the events of the day Aired January 6, 2021. The department has also warned of the problems for Congressional Headquarters security that these leaks could cause.
Jean-Pierre has also echoed earlier criticism from the news channel itself, noting that Carlson’s programs are “not credible sources of information”. The Democratic Party has gone further, accusing him of diving “into the depths of the conspiracy waters” to fool the public into believing the storming of the Capitol was non-violent, and also targeting McCarthy for not doing so shared images requested in vain by a good series of American media. Fox will continue to air the unreleased footage for the next few days.
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