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fox-news-executives-denounce-trump-myth-january-6-riot-rcna73669

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By early January 2021, Fox News hosts and executives were ready to move on from then-President Donald Trump and his insistence that the election was stolen.

"it's been 8 weeks and none of them has produced anything tangible or verifiable. and now he wants thousands of his supporters to go to DC without shelter or food to demonstrate," host Lou Dobbs texted a producer on his show on Jan. 3. "I believe the election was stolen — but without evidence we can do nothing significant."

"We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights," Tucker Carlson wrote in a Jan. 4 text to an unidentified person. "I truly can't wait."

"I hate him passionately," he continued. "I can't handle much more of this."

The revealing private messages were unsealed Tuesday night, part of a massive cache of evidence in the $1.6 billion Dominion defamation suit against Fox News and the Fox Corp. They paint a remarkably frank picture of how key players at Fox News viewed the stolen election lie that motivated a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Fox News argued the voting systems manufacturer was skewing the evidence.

“Dominion has been caught red handed again using more distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear FOX News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press," a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement.

Dominion has said the released documents speak for themselves.

Trump and his lawyers "have so discredited their own case, and the rest of us to some extent, that it's infuriating," Carlson continued in his texts. "Absolutely enrages me."

The next day, Jan. 5, Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch tapped an email out on his iPhone: Maybe our top talent needs to take a stand.

"It's been suggested our primetime three should independently or together say something like 'the election is over and Joe Biden won. We are all disappointed by it happened. We love America and have to turn the page. We will now be the loyal opposition criticizing every liberal mistake the new administration makes,'" Murdoch wrote to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott.

"Not those words, but a refinement would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen," he added. "And the basis of his 2024 campaign."

Scott forwarded the email to Meade Cooper, the executive vice president of prime-time programming.

"I told Rupert that privately they are all there — we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers but they know how to navigate."

Trump's troubles multiplying. His businesses now ruined! Who is going to throw a party at one of his golf clubs or hotels?

Rupert Murdoch in an Email on Jan. 12, 2021

But the top talent at Fox News never did take a stand.

Instead, prime-time hosts talked up the Stop the Steal rally taking place in Washington on Jan. 6.

On the night of Jan. 5, prime-time host Sean Hannity put Eric Trump on the air, who ran through a laundry list of exaggerated or debunked fraud claims he suggested cost his father the election.

"The Republic, its future, our futures, are hanging in the balance," Dobbs said on Jan. 5, teeing up Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton, who argued that the outcome of the election could be changed by state legislatures and Congress on Jan. 6.

And next morning, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitolin an effort to block the certification of the results of the 2020 election. Rioters smashed windows and doors, looted and ransacked offices andengaged in hours of violent clashes. About 140 officers were assaulted that day, andtwo pipe bombswere also planted nearby, but did not detonate.

The privatetexts and emails included in Dominion's evidence offer a remarkable snapshot of the frustration and discontent at Fox News hours and days after the attack — messages that were far different from what they were putting on air.

"he isn't saying what's actually going on. just beating around the bush," Carlson producer Alex Pfeiffer complained in a text exchange with Carlson senior executive producer Justin Wells and an unnamed individual, dissecting Carlson's show on Jan. 6. "why do people think it was stolen? didn't happen immacutately. trump told them thats what happened."

Inside the Fox companies, the shift was urgent, sometimes frenzied.

"Fox News very busy pivoting. ... We want to make Trump a non person," Murdoch wrote in one email on Jan. 8.

Fox News "is pivoting as fast as possible. We have to lead our viewers which is not as easy as it might seem," he wrote in another days later.

Related coverage

The day after Biden's inauguration, Murdoch was facing heat from Republican senators.

That morning, he met with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and other GOP senators who were opposed to impeaching Trump.

“Still getting mud thrown at us!” Murdoch wrote. “Maybe Sean and Laura went too far,” he continued, referring to Hannity and Laura Ingraham.

He asked Scott whether it was “unarguable that high profile Fox voices fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6th an important chance to have the result overturned.”

Scott punted the request to a group of executives, noting “please send specifics.”

Six hours later, Irena Briganti, the Fox News executive in charge of communications, responded with more than 15 pages of transcripts of examples.

In a Jan. 12 email exchange with former House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Murdoch said "everything changed" on the day of the riot.

"Trump's troubles multiplying. His businesses now ruined! Who is going to throw a party at one of his golf clubs or hotels?"

He went on: "Could he still resign and get Pence to pardon, then just disappear? Would Mike Pence agree?"

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-handling-jeanine-pirros-election-conspiracy-theories-reveals-full-extent-its fuckery

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although former President Barack Obama has often been critical of Fox News, he hasn't avoided the right-wing cable news channel altogether. Obama, over the years, has been interviewed by Fox News hosts ranging from Chris Wallace (now with CNN) to Bret Baier to Bill O’Reilly (who Fox News fired in 2017).

Those appearances underscore Obama's belief that it is important for Democrats to have a dialogue with conservatives, disagreements and all — a belief he shares with President Joe Biden, who has bragged about the productive relationships he had in the past with President Ronald Reagan, Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) and other conservative Republicans.

But when Obama, according to The Guardian, GUK made a late March appearance in Sydney, Australia, he called out Fox News' Rupert Murdoch as a divisive figure whose business model is designed to "make people angry and resentful."

Speaking at Sydney’s Aware Super Theater on Tuesday night, March 28, Obama told a crowd of around 9000 people, "Here's the good news about the U.S., though: We're not quite as polarized as we seem. Sixty to 65 percent of the country — let's call it 70 percent — does occupy a reality-based world. And that's true within the Republicans."

Obama continued, "There's one other factor that's led to this polarization — this is global, this is not unique to the United States — and that is the shifts in the media and the story that is told to people. And there's a guy you may be familiar with, first name Rupert, who was responsible for a lot of this."

Murdoch, according to Obama, "perfected" a "broader trend" with "the advent of cable (television), talk radio and then social media."

Obama told the Australian crowd, "It's now a wild west and a splintering of media. And if all you're doing is — in America, it's Fox News, here I guess it's Sky, whatever it is — if all you're doing is watching one source of news…. we're going to have our own news and our own perspective…. You no longer have a joint conversation and a shared story….And if you throw in some good old-fashioned racism and xenophobia and sexism and homophobia…. it's very difficult to compromise around identity politics."

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the latest developments in Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News unfolded in a New York City courtroom on Wednesday. Media Matters for America senior fellow Matthew Gertz obtained copies of slides containing previously unseen conversations between Fox employees about the network's hosts, who despite management's misgivings were permitted to peddle former President Donald Trump's bogus allegations about the 2020 election.

Gertz live-tweeted the drama.

For example, Fox Chief Executive Officer Suzanne Scott reportedly wrote in an email to anchor Eric Shawn in December 2020 that "this has to stop now... this is bad business... the audience is furious and we are just feeding them material." Scott also stated that November that "I can't keep defending these reporters who don't understand our viewers and how to handle stories... We lost 25k subs from FOX NATION."

One personality, "Judge" Jeanine Pirro, was railed against by production staff in November 2020 over her militant defense of Trump's baseless claims that the contest was "rigged and stolen" by President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

Pirro's scheduled monologue was "rife w conspiracy theories and bs and is yet another example why this woman should never be on live television," her executive producer complained to Fox's top brass.

Gertz noted that "Fox subsequently promoted Pirro, making her a co-host of the LIVE panel show The Five."

He added that according to Dominion's legal filings, David Clark, Fox's senior vice president of Weekend News, "did not believe Jeanine Pirro was actually a 'credible source of news,' even as he understood that 'viewers rely on' Pirro 'to be a credible source.'"