Fox and the diary of a madwoman
The newest document dump from the $1.6 billion Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox is news the network’s viewers won’t see. A flood of incriminating texts and emails between Fox staffers reveals how much the network caved to pressure to feed viewers what they wanted to hear rather than the truth. The internal texts also reveal how much network top executives knew the 2020 election fraud narrative Donald Trump and network anchors promoted was bullshit.
This text in particular will have a hard time finding its way to Tucker Carlson’s fans (Washington Post):
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” prime-time host Tucker Carlson texted a colleague on Jan. 4, 2021. “I truly can’t wait.”
Carlson, who had shared private meetings with the president and defended him on-air, added in a text: “I hate him passionately. … What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”
Fox’s founder knew it too.
“Maybe Sean and Laura went too far,” Fox’s billionaire co-founder Rupert Murdoch emailed the company CEO, referring to prime-time stars Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, who had entertained the baseless election conspiracy theories on-air.
“All very well for Sean to tell you he was in despair about Trump,” Murdoch continued, “but what did he tell his viewers?”
[…]
Not long after Murdoch agonized over whether his hosts had “gone too far,” one of the most high-ranking news editors, Bill Sammon, texted a colleague: “In my 22 years affiliated with Fox, this is the closest thing I’ve seen to an existential crisis — at least journalistically.” The “crisis” was the network’s continued focus on what Sammon called “supposed election fraud.”
Sammon is behind the times. The right’s existential crisis began on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, when the country elected a Black man to the White House. White conservatives until then could ignore repeated warnings that by 2042 demographic shifts would mean whites would no longer be a numerical majority in “their” country. That white voters had not been a voting majority for many election cycles was too subtle.
But Barack Obama’s face on their TV screens each night was a shock to the dominant caste Isabel Wilkerson described in her “instant American classic” a dozen years later. White backlash to Obama brought us Donald Trump, the T-party, and MAGA. It may yet bring Fox to its knees, or at least Tucker Carlson.
Just how desperate Trump’s true believers were to believe the election had been stolen comes in the form of a letter from one Marlene Bourne forwarded by self-appointed Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo: “proof” that Dominion voting machines flipped Trump votes Joe Biden (from mid-February):
One particularly odd section deals with how the source claims to have gotten her information. It says:
“Who am I? And how do I know all of this?…I’ve had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl….I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live….The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.”
At another point she described herself as being able to “time-travel in a semi-conscious state.”
Does she call the wind Mariah?
Reading about the letter in February was one thing. Seeing it now is another.
Bartiromo called the Bourne letter “nonsense” in her deposition yet nonetheless brought Powell onto her November 8, 2020 show to discuss a “a massive and coordinated effort” to “steal” the 2020 election (without mentioning the letter). Bartiromo asked for no proof of Powell’s claims. And the stolen election narrative took off.
(Daily Beast reporter Justin Baragona’s tweets on this Dominion material are eye-opening.)
But the Fox news division’s election call of Arizona for Joe Biden had sent viewers into fits. The stock price was down! Despise Trump or not, Tucker Carlson in particular was desperate to retain audience share by reinforcing the Bourne-Powell narrative of election theft, adding voter fraud to the mix like shrapnel to an improvised explosive. A violent insurrection and the ransacking of the U.S. Capitol followed on Jan. 6, 2021.
How desperate was the network?
“So what Tucker [Carlson] comes up with is, dead people voting is how he’s going to get the audience back on the side, and he gets a special on dead people voting on one of his shows,” Chris Hayes told former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki Tuesday night (Raw Story):
“This is a screen grab from an exchange on November 11th, features one of the greatest lines I’ve ever read,” said
CarlsonHayes. “‘Do we have enough dead people for tonight?’ Unknown: ‘I think we have six or seven names right now. Miller told me they might drop some more names.’ ‘Good. But obviously, they need to do what they can to help us. I mean, seriously, let me know if I should call.’ Miller, maybe Stephen Miller. I should say subsequently I think he featured four dead voters who voted, three of whom were alive. But this is like the creative problem solving happened there is like we need to tell them what they want to hear, how can we do it?”
This is always who Tucker Carlson has been. “Stop hurting America,” Jon Stewart told Carlson on CNN’s “Crossfire” in 2004.
“You’re as big a dick on your show as you ar on any show,” Stewart said.
Nothing has changed. Carlson and Fox are still hurting America.