Fox News Knows Donald Trump’s Election Fraud Claims Are False. They Still Broadcast It.

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Those bastards are destroying our credibility. I’m angry, Tucker Carlson texted his producer two days after Election Day 2020. The fuckers in question were Fox News employees who accurately reported Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona.

It’s hard to think of a more succinct encapsulation of the conservative media than one of its biggest stars complaining that the truth is destroying his credibility.

Carlson is not alone. A week later, Sean Hannity texted Carlson and fellow Fox personality Laura Ingraham that calling Arizona again for Biden, we should emphasize, simply reporting the truth had damaged a brand that it took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.

Carlson later tried to get another Fox News reporter fired over a tweet questioning Trump’s false claims about election fraud. Carlson did not say the reporters’ tweets were inaccurate, according to the newly disclosed text messages. Instead, his main concern is the stock price [of Foxs parent company] is down Not a joke.

It may come as no surprise to many readers that Fox News values ​​right-wing propaganda over facts. But newly released documents from a major defamation case against the network show just how deep a cynical disregard for reality runs with its biggest on-air talent.

In a $1.6 billion lawsuit, voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems says Fox News defamed it by claiming Dominion machines were shifting votes from Trump to Biden. As part of the lawsuit, Dominion gained access to Fox’s internal communications, some of which were released in a court filing yesterday.

Quotes like Carlson’s about the stock price and continued anxiety about low ratings by Fox pundits and executives bolster Dominions’ argument that Fox personalities continue to claim they know it’s wrong because of -worried about losing viewers to more extreme outlets like Newsmax. Carlson and Ingraham have privately described Trump’s surrogates in terms like a liar and a complete nut. But in one of the few accurate statements he made, Carlson got to the heart of the issue. Trump, he wrote in a text to his producer, is easy to destroy if we play it wrong.

In their internal communications, Carlson and Hannity are less like journalists and more like hucksters who realize the jig is up. Stuck between the potential anger of Trump and his followers on the one hand, and Fox owner Rupert Murdochs insistence on reporting material with some semblance of truth on the other, they were confused.

Fox says it only reports claims made by Trump and other newsworthy individuals without spreading false claims itself. But Dominion seems unusually confident of its chances, given how difficult defamation cases are for plaintiffs in the United States.

So far, Fox has been able to keep portions of its communications redacted in public versions of court filings. Adding to the Foxs’ legal headaches, the New York Times sued to unseal the entire record. We may not have seen the worst of it yet.

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