4/4/2023 0 Comments Fox news on redacted email![]() Scott: “Yes today is day one and it’s a process.” But needs constant rebuilding without any missteps” Scott: “It’s a question of trust - the AZ was damaging but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them” ![]() Scott also exchanged texts with Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s son and the Fox Corporation’s CEO: We don’t want to antagonize Trump further, but Giuliani taken with a large grain of salt.” He added, ominously, “Everything at stake here.” “An alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us,” Carlson continued.įox News anchor Dana Perino wrote to a Republican strategist about “this RAGING issue about fox losing tons of viewers and many watching - get this - newsmax! Our viewers are so mad about the election calls.” And Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott told another executive that the political team did not understand “the impact to the brand and the arrogance in calling AZ.”įox Corporation chair Rupert Murdoch later emailed Scott that Newsmax “should be watched, if skeptically. The fear of alienating the audience was particularly acute because another conservative cable network with a more conspiratorial bent, Newsmax, was covering Trump’s stolen election claims far more uncritically. “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real,” he wrote. ![]() On November 7, Carlson again wrote to his producer when Fox called Biden as the winner nationally (this time, alongside the other major networks). ![]() He went on to say that what Trump is good at is “destroying things,” adding, “He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.” It enrages me,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson wrote to his producer on November 5. Those fuckers are destroying our credibility. “We worked really hard to build what we have. In getting out on a limb and calling Arizona for Biden when no one else was doing so, it appeared to Fox’s pro-Trump viewers like the network was shivving Trump. Biden eventually won the state by a mere 0.3 percent margin.īut the Fox personalities’ real concern was not so much with the facts or technical details of election wonkery as with the optics. Other outlets left Arizona uncalled for more than a week as counting continued, and Biden’s lead shrank there. The consensus among other decision desks and election wonks was that Fox called the state too quickly, considering how much of the vote remained uncounted and where and whom those uncounted votes were coming from. The Fox call was consequential, seriously undercutting Trump’s hope of portraying the election outcome as genuinely in question. The way Dominion’s attorneys tell the story, the problem really started when, late on election night, Fox News’s decision desk called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden - and no other networks joined them. The terror of losing audience trust - and competition from Newsmax And if Fox doesn’t provide it, those audiences will just seek it out elsewhere. There’s an intense desire for it among viewers that organizations like Fox calculate they have to satisfy in some way. More broadly, in understanding how lies and conspiracies spread on the right, it’s important to reckon not just with the suppliers of this coverage, but also the demand. But an ongoing defamation lawsuit from the voting machine company Dominion against Fox News tells a more complex story - one in which the network’s key players feel compelled to supply the conspiratorial content the audience is demanding.Ī new filing by Dominion’s attorneys released Thursday cited a trove of Fox emails and texts they had obtained in the discovery phase of the lawsuit, as well as testimony from top executives and hosts, to lay out a narrative about what happened in the tense weeks after Election Day 2020, when then-President Donald Trump was spreading lies about the election.Īs they discussed coverage of Trump’s falsehoods, Fox’s top executives and primetime personalities were explicitly terrified of alienating pro-Trump viewers, panicked about losing the “trust” of the audience, and anxious about competition from the further right and more conspiratorial Newsmax.Īlmost everyone at the network, it seems, understood Trump’s allegations about a stolen election, and particularly his attorney Sidney Powell’s wacky tales of malfeasance from Dominion, were nonsense.īut an intense culture of what one might call “political correctness” took hold - in which challenging Trump and Powell’s claims could only happen with the utmost care and sensitivity, for fear of offending the tender feelings of Fox viewers. Some liberals have a mental model in which the network lies to and misleads its audience, propagandizing them to support Republicans and the right.
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