Donald Trump has been known as quite a lot of issues by lots of people over the past variety of years. “Agent Orange.” “Sentient circus peanut.” “Staph an infection on the ass of society.” One thing that “got here out of a clogged drain on the Wonka manufacturing facility.” Nonetheless, nobody anticipated the ex-president to be described in something lower than glowing phrases by the gang over at Fox Information, the community that successfully served as state TV whereas he was in workplace. And but, at the least one in every of Fox’s high speaking heads likened him to none apart from the satan again in 2021, all whereas slinging the man’s election lies on dwell TV.
In a textual content message to his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, despatched the day of the January 6 rebellion, Tucker Carlson—good friend to warfare criminals and serial liars alike—known as Trump “a demonic power, a destroyer.” The host added: “However he’s not going to destroy us.” We all know this because of a Thursday courtroom submitting from Dominion Voting Techniques, the voting expertise firm at the moment suing Fox Information for $1.6 billion over the community’s 2020 election protection. The submitting gives an inside glimpse at what the community’s high stars and executives have been saying amongst themselves about Trump’s election lies—i.e., that they have been bullshit—regardless of claiming that the election had been stolen with Dominion’s assist.
“From the highest down, Fox knew ‘the dominion stuff’ was ‘complete bs,’” the submitting reads, citing “a mountain of direct proof.” Positing that the rationale the community “peddle[d] this false narrative to its viewers,” attorneys for Dominion stated that “Fox’s appropriate name of Arizona for Joe Biden triggered a backlash amongst its viewers and ‘the community [was] being rejected.’” For instance, two days after the election, on November 5, 2020, Carlson texted Pfeiffer to say that the staff that had known as Arizona for Biden was going to screw up his fame as a right-wing crackpot (our phrases). “We labored actually onerous to construct what we’ve got,” Carlson stated, in line with the submitting. “These fuckers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.” Pfeiffer then responded that “many on ‘our aspect’ are being reckless demagogues proper now.” (“Our aspect” presumably refers to hosts like Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham.) “In fact they’re,” Carlson wrote again. “We’re not going to observe them.” He added that the then president was good at “destroying issues. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He may simply destroy us if we play it flawed.”
The submitting notes that, days later, Carlson wrote privately that Trump wanted to confess “that there wasn’t sufficient fraud to alter the result” of the election. Later, he wrote that Sidney Powell, one in every of Trump’s legal professionals, was “mendacity” about having proof of fraud. A couple of days after that, Carlson expressed comparable concepts to Ingraham, saying, “Sidney Powell is mendacity by the best way. I caught her. It’s insane.” Ingraham responded, “Sidney is an entire nut. Nobody will work along with her. Ditto with Rudy.” Carlson replied, “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good folks they usually imagine it.”
And but, by mid-January, Carlson was apparently all in on publicly pushing Workforce Trump’s election lies on his viewers. Simply weeks after the rebellion and his likening of Trump to the satan, the prime time host had Mike Lindell on his present, the place, per the submitting, the My Pillow founder “spouted…conspiracies on air after previewing them for Carlson’s workers throughout a pre-interview.”
In an announcement, Fox Information stated: “There might be quite a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic personal fairness homeowners, however the core of this case stays about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, that are basic rights afforded by the Structure and guarded by New York Instances v. Sullivan.” The community additionally insisted that Dominion “mischaracterized the document, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled appreciable ink on information which can be irrelevant below black-letter rules of defamation legislation.”
