Lies have short legs, but now they run faster than ever. They are driven not only by out-of-control vehicles such as the networks, but also by traditional media such as television. In the United States, a 1.6 million dollar defamation lawsuit filed by the electronic voting company Dominion against Fox has exposed the gigantic farce that the ultra-conservative network mounted, and continues to mount, with its support for the accusations of electoral fraud of Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential elections.
Both the owner of the media empire, Rupert Murdoch, and its main stars on screen, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, privately mocked the former president’s “follies” and falsehoods…, while on air they They gave full veracity and all the possible field.
The evidence of the teasing of the audience, captured black on white in hundreds of pages of e-mails between the protagonists, is so clear that even the White House has declared Fox News a “non-credible news” source, in Expression of Joe Biden’s spokeswoman and Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre.
In one of the emails exchanged between Fox presenters and managers in late 2020 and early 2021, the ultra Tucker Carlson said of Trump: “I passionately hate him.” A relatively shocking statement –relatively because many already suspected him– in who used to and usually supports the ex-president in his proposals, theories and arguments.
Less than two years later, at a public event held last December in Phoenix (Arizona), the same journalist and showman stated: “In fact, I love Donald Trump, as a man. I think he’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever talked to in my life.”
But Carlson did not laugh when, two years ago, he privately blamed Trump for the assault on the Capitol and, a fortnight before Biden’s inauguration, told his producer, Alex Pfeiffer: “Trump has two weeks left. Once he’s out, he’ll become immeasurably less powerful… he’s a demonic force, a destroyer. But he will not destroy us.
The truth is that the former president would maintain his pull before the voters and viewers, and all the stars of Fox would follow and still follow in his wake without hardly complaining. Carlson in particular has just released recordings of 6-E that the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, has provided him exclusively, to conclude that that violent and lethal insurrection was “a mostly peaceful chaos”: an assertion that the spokeswoman of Biden called last Tuesday “shameful.”
Other presenters on the network, including Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity, called Trump and the aides who helped him defend the voter fraud lie “crazy,” “idiots,” “ridiculous” and “hooters.” Of course, always in private, because before the public they did the opposite. So much so that Fox Corporation owner Rupert Murdoch told Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott that Ingraham and Hannity “went too far” in endorsing the former president’s false claims. The tycoon added that the Republican leader and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani seemed “more and more crazy” and that “the real danger is what Trump could do as president.” Last January, Murdoch also said, under oath in his Dominion deposition, that the 2020 presidential election was “free and fair, not stolen.”
Although there is plenty of evidence of the ultra tendency of the Fox presenters and the right-wing affiliation of their employer, their defense of Trump’s falsehoods knowing that they were never an ideological question, but rather one of money.
And it is that, as the internal messages now aired also show, the only reason why the presenters said the opposite of what they thought was their panic at the loss of audience. A panic that broke out suddenly, when, after having been the first to recognize Biden’s victory, they saw how the until then minority but super-Trump television Newsmax stole hundreds of thousands of viewers through a closed defense of the theory of fraud.
In this context, when Fox’s own reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted that “there was no evidence of voter fraud,” Carlson wrote to Hannity: “Please fire her. She is hurting the company. The stock price has gone down. It is not a joke”.
The money track doesn’t fail.
