Fox News hosts called 2020 election fraud 'total BS' in private, new Dominion court filing says
Fox News anchors and producers privately acknowledged that former President Donald Trump and his allies' allegations of election fraud in the aftermath of the 2020 election were false despite their network's promotion of those claims, according to a new court filing by Dominion Voting Systems.
In a nearly 200-page document filed as part of its billion-dollar defamation suit against the network, Dominion Voting Systems shared emails, texts, testimony, and other private communications from Fox News personnel that cast doubt on claims that Dominion's voting machines had somehow rigged the presidential election in Joe Biden's favor.
So basically "Trump is a demonic force, a destroyer. But I make a shitload of money supporting him so I'll do everything I can to make sure he gets all the power he wants, and repeat all his lies for him."
Fox knows they are not news. Other channels know they are not news. The only people who dont know are fucking morons, urr im mean fox watchers.
This is actually a pretty big deal. It’s clear evidence that the Fox hosts knew that the election fraud stuff was bullshit, but they aired it anyway. Malicious disregard for the truth is a major aspect when proving libel, and this is strong proof.
Fox Stars Privately Expressed Disbelief About Election Fraud Claims. ‘Crazy Stuff.’
Fox News stunned the Trump campaign on election night by becoming the first news outlet to declare Joseph R. Biden Jr. the winner of Arizona — effectively projecting that he would become the next president. Then, as Fox’s ratings fell sharply after the election and the president refused to concede, many of the network’s most popular hosts and shows began promoting outlandish claims of a far-reaching voter fraud conspiracy involving Dominion machines to deny Mr. Trump a second term.
And also there’s this with Tucker Carlson:
On Nov. 12, in a group text chain among Ms. Ingraham, Mr. Carlson and Mr. Hannity, Mr. Carlson pointed to a tweet in which a Fox reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, fact-checked a tweet from Mr. Trump referring to Fox broadcasts and said there was no evidence of voter fraud from Dominion.
“Please get her fired, ”Mr. Carlson said. He added: “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Ms. Heinrich had deleted her tweet by the next morning.
This is terrible. Tucker didn’t like a co-worker doing her job because it hurt the stock price, and so he pushed to get her fired and was able to have her delete her tweet the next morning. What an anti-American piece of shit.
Also, this is an excellent thread about all this from Will Summer of the The DailyBeast. The court documents are screenshotted of what he’s referencing below each tweet in seeing actual documents.
Off the air, Fox News stars blasted the election fraud claims they peddled
In the days and weeks after the 2020 elections, the Fox News Channel repeatedly broadcast false claims that then-President Donald Trump had been cheated of victory.
Off the air, the network's stars, producers and executives expressed contempt for those same conspiracies, calling them "mind-blowingly nuts," "totally off the rails" and "completely bs" - often in far earthier terms.
The network's top primetime stars - Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity - texted contemptuously of the claims in group chats, but also denounced colleagues pointing that out publicly or on television.
It's a very telling thing they would mock these claims and people but have a low enough opinion of their audience that they would think they would believe such ridiculous claims.
And sadly, they thought right. It's the ones calling everyone else sheeple that are the most easily led.
I remember tuning in to Fox’s Tucker/Ingraham/etc the night of Jan. 6. That day, they weren’t exactly telling their massive audience that Trump was “off the rails”… far from it, in fact. Because they couldn’t. They’re paycheck chasers. Leadership has never been their purpose.
Big shocker—if you radicalize an audience and devalue truth for years, at some point you’ll end up with an audience that has gone completely off the deep end. And then they’re dictating terms to you.
That’s why you’d see Fox News wringing its hands so often, every time they’d lose flocks of viewers to OAN and Newsmax because they stopped short of running the looniest of the loony conspiracy theories.
Same reason all those establishment Republicans would wince every time they tried to disavow Trump once and for all, only to have to go crawling back, time after time, because MAGA crazies had become their base.
"Sidney Powell is lying," about having evidence for election fraud, Tucker Carlson told a producer about the attorney on Nov. 16, 2020, according to an excerpt from an exhibit that remains under seal.
The internal communication was included in a redacted summary judgment brief filed Thursday by attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems.
Carlson also referred to Powell in a text as an "unguided missile," and "dangerous as hell." Fellow host Laura Ingraham, meanwhile, told Carlson that Powell is "a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy," referring to former New York mayor and Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani.
Sean Hannity, meanwhile, said in a deposition "that whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second," according to Dominion's filing.
And yet everything else is fake news. Their viewers are such puppets.
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