Starting soon, we'll be bringing a new version of the show we've been doing for
the last six and a half years to Twitter.
We bring some other things too, which we'll tell you about.
But for now, we're just grateful to be here.
Free speech is the main right that you have.
Without it, you have no others.
See you soon.
>> Amir, two weeks after Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News, he announced
that he will be doing a version of his Fox News show on Twitter, of all places.
But this story, which is currently developing as we speak,
just keeps getting more interesting.
Because it turns out that Tucker is also taking legal action against Fox News,
accusing them of fraud and breach of contract.
Now, we'll get into more details on that in just a moment.
But before we do, why don't we dive into the video that he posted on Twitter,
making this big announcement about what his next media venture will be?
Let's watch.
>> Hey, it's Tucker Carlson.
You often hear people say the news is full of lies.
But most of the time, that's not exactly right.
Much of what you see on television or read the New York Times is, in fact,
true in the literal sense.
It could pass one of the media's own fact checks.
Lawyers would be willing to sign off on it.
In fact, they may have, but that doesn't make it true, it's not true.
At the most basic level, the news you consume is a lie,
a lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind.
Facts have been withheld on purpose, along with proportion and perspective,
you are being manipulated.
How does that work, let's see.
If I tell you that a man has been unjustly arrested for armed robbery, that is not,
strictly speaking, a lie.
He may have been framed, at this point, there's been no trial, so
no one can really say.
But if I don't mention the fact that the same man has been arrested for
the same crime six times before, am I really informing you?
No, I'm not, I'm misleading you.
And that's what the news media are doing in every story that matters,
every day of the week, every week of the year.
>> So there you have it, the man who misled his audience and
literally lied to them because he knew that they wanted to hear certain
things is now saying that he is a warrior for truth and free speech.
Fascinating stuff there, Cenk.
>> No, but the great irony here and what's frustrating to me is that all the things
that he just said in that particular clip are absolutely true.
>> They are.
>> In fact, the first two-thirds of his video, until he gets to Twitter, are true.
He tells you what we tell you all the time.
In fact, he's almost copying us, almost word for word and
what our criticism of mainstream media.
And by the way, Fox News and the rest of corporate media is.
The problem is he's the biggest liar on TV.
We have the text absolutely, positively proving it.
So this guy is a master manipulator.
He tells you something that at its core that is true, and
they use it to lie to you, it's amazing.
He's a master propagandist, but there's more video and
more discussion of what he's gonna do next.
>> So while he talks about the importance of speaking freely,
he implies pretty heavily in this video that he was unable to speak his mind or
speak freely while he was at Fox.
>> What's it like to work in a system like that?
After more than 30 years in the middle of it, we could tell you stories.
The best you can hope for in the news business at this point is the freedom to
tell the fullest truth that you can.
But there are always limits, and you know that if you bump up
against those limits often enough, you will be fired for it.
That's not a guess, it's guaranteed.
Every person who works in English language media understands that.
The rule of what you can't say defines everything.
It's filthy, really, and it's utterly corrupting.
>> So I have a lot to say about that, because fact of the matter is regardless
of where you work, whether it's pressure from your employer or
pressure from your audience, the ability to speak freely in this country right now,
it's incredibly difficult to do.
Let's just keep it real, right?
In his case, I mean, it seems like he's making an accusation against Fox News.
But let's also remember, Cenk,
that he felt that he needed to lie to the audience about the election being stolen
from Donald Trump because he knew that was exactly what they wanted to hear.
He wanted a reporter who fact-checked one of Trump's tweets to get fired
because the audience didn't like that.
That was negatively impacting the value of Fox News's stock, right?
So whether it's the audience or the employer,
free speech in the context of news in America is real difficult to come by.
>> So his critique, again, the second part of the video, 100% agree.
It is corrupting, you do have limits, you will be fired.
So I wasn't fired, but
I was pushed out because of a very similar situation at MSNBC.
Those things are all true, but then the great irony, guys,
is if all you did was watch that video, you would have the same problem
that he explained in the first part that we showed you.
You just hear about the guy who got arrested once, and
you wouldn't hear the rest of the story.
You wouldn't hear that he got arrested six times, you wouldn't hear the full context.
So if you just see that video, you go, well, that does sound true about American
media, but the full context is this guy is patient zero.
>> Absolutely.
>> He told those lies on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.
He's the one guy that was on every cable station and
told a different lie at each cable station he went to, isn't that amazing?
And at Fox News, it's definitive.
We have the text saying, I hate Donald Trump, he's a monster, he's a destroyer.
>> He's a demonic force.
And then he goes on air, goes, Donald Trump,
the one guy who's great at telling you the truth.
What a preposterous, gigantic liar,
trying to take on the mantle of something that is true about the media.
But to be fair to him, it is a brilliant deception for
him to do the very thing he's complaining about within that video, amazing.
>> Right, and to take the mantle of fierce truth-teller who wants to speak his mind.
Now, let's get to the part of the video where he makes the big announcement
about his partnership with Twitter.
>> Amazingly, as of tonight,
there aren't many platforms left that allow free speech.
The last big one remaining in the world, the only one,
is Twitter, where we are now.
Twitter has long served as the place where our national conversation incubates and
develops.
Twitter is not a partisan site, everybody's allowed here, and
we think that's a good thing.
And yet for the most part, the news that you see analyzed on Twitter comes from
media organizations that are themselves thinly disguised propaganda outlets.
You see it on cable news, you talk about it on Twitter.
The result may feel like a debate, but actually,
the gatekeepers are still in charge.
We think that's a bad system, we know exactly how it works, and
we're sick of it.
Starting soon, we'll be bringing a new version of the show we've been doing for
the last six and a half years to Twitter.
We bring some other things too, which we'll tell you about, but for now,
we're just grateful to be here.
Free speech is the main right that you have.
Without it, you have no others.
See you soon.
>> So he is planning to forego the rest of his Fox News contract,
meaning what remains of the money that they're supposed to pay him
as a result of his contract, which is up in January of 2025.
So it's definitely gonna be more than $20 million.
But he is also, again, pursuing legal action against Fox News,
and is accusing them of breaching the contract first,
which makes the exclusivity clause invalid, according to him.
So I'm gonna give you more details about that impending legal action in just
a moment.
But Cenk, it's curious to me that he's going in this weird Twitter
direction when Twitter's been malfunctioning quite a bit.
[LAUGH] What's going on?
>> No, I totally get it, the minute I saw it, I was like, of course,
I should have thought of that earlier, why?
What did I tell you guys?
Newsmax and Rumble and all those guys, I don't think they could really afford him.
They might be able to give him 20 million or 40 million for
the short term contract, but they just don't have that kind of money, and
they don't have that kind of audience, and it's not sustainable.
The platforms, on the other hand, especially if they change their
algorithms, all Elon Musk has to do is press a button and goes,
everybody gets Tucker Carlson's show served to them.
He will have millions upon millions of,
anybody that does a show like that would get millions of viewers, okay?
It just needs Elon to press a freaking button.
And who's the one guy rich enough to be able to offer Tucker Carlson more than $20
million a year,
which is what he's foregoing from Fox by breaking the contract?
Of course, Elon Musk.
Elon Musk already burned $44 billion on Twitter,
he'd be almost irrational not to do this.
>> Okay, but I'm trying to understand what that would look like.
What would a show- >> Super easy, they already had one, so
I could tell you about it.
>> Okay, go ahead.
>> So what they do is, you know how were, if you're on, whether mainly on a desktop,
laptop, etc., but it's featured in different ways on your apps,
on the phone, but they put it next to trending.
There's a video, there used to be a morning show on Twitter in the previous
administration, and you see the video going on the side.
And plus, they could serve that video to all of the users, right, or
a huge percentage of the users.
When you send out a tweet, it only goes to a certain site.
So let's take me as an example, I roughly have a million followers, right?
But when I send a tweet, it doesn't go to all of them.
>> Yeah, it only goes to people who hate follow Cenk for some reason.
[LAUGH] That's what it seems like.
>> But every platform has an algorithm where they say, hey,
it goes to 12% of your audience, 10%, 8%.
Now, Facebook, it only goes to a small percentage, and you could purchase
the ability to send it to more of your own audience, your own followers, okay?
But all they have to do is change the algorithm and say, for
this particular video, send it to everyone.
Now, all of a sudden, hundreds of millions of people are gonna get it.
And that is incredibly powerful,
none of the other platforms have chosen to do that.
And look, I've talked about this in the past, I think YouTube, Facebook, etc.,
they keep their Ferraris in the garage, especially YouTube.
I don't know why they don't unleash them, but they don't.
Here, you think Elon Musk is going to have any kind of constraints?
No, he's gonna pay Tucker a lot of money, and then he's gonna press that button, and
he's gonna send it to everyone.
And so this is actually, look, our job is to be honest with you guys,
I don't like Tucker, I don't like Elon, but this is probably a brilliant move,
it's probably gonna work spectacularly.
So that's my real opinion.
>> I'm a little more skeptical than you are, let's see how this plays out.
I mean, you would need to invest in the platform, and Elon Musk,
aside from investing his own personal money, has done the opposite.
>> You're right, Ana, that's a good point.
I mean, could Elon screw it up?
I mean, he screwed up everything at Twitter, right?
>> He fired pretty important,
key employees that help with the functionality of the platform.
>> Yeah, it's glitchy as all hell, so
he's gonna have to reinvest in the platform if he wants this to work.
And so don't get me wrong, 1000 things could go wrong.
But if the news today was he's going with Newsmax,
I'd have told you that's the end of his career.
He's starting something on his own, I'd say, good luck, brother.
I told you yesterday that's a very tough thing to do,
to run a business in the digital media space on your own.
But if you go with a giant platform with one of the richest men in
the world financing you, that makes a lot of sense and is likely to work.
Now, in terms of his battle with Fox, look, he played that one smart, too.
Our job is to be honest.
>> Can I give them the details on what he's doing here?
>> Yeah. >> Okay, great,
so he is accusing Fox of fraud and also breaching the contract, which would make
the exclusivity clause invalid, according to the lawyer representing him.
And that lawyer is a pretty high-powered lawyer named Brian Friedman.
So he sends a letter to executives over at Fox News.
And in that letter, the accusation is that Fox broke an agreement with Carlson,
get a load of this, not to leak his private communications to the media and
not to use Carlson's private messages to take any adverse
employment action against him.
It is very obvious that someone at Fox News is leaking tape to the press,
which is why we've been covering those leaked tapes,
we've been covering all sorts of content of Tucker Carlson.
He's micked up, and it's probably during breaks or before he goes live.
The only people who would have access to that are individuals over at Fox.
The letter also alleges that Fox broke promises not to settle with
Dominion Voting Systems in a way which would indicate wrongdoing on
the part of Carlson, and not to take action or
any actions in a settlement that would harm Carlson's reputation.
And Carlson was told by a member of the Fox board that he was taken off
the air as part of the Dominion settlement, according to two sources
briefed on the conversation, and they spoke to Axios about this.
Carlson is also claiming, finally, that Briganti,
who's one of the executives over at Fox.
Fox's longtime communications and PR chief attempted to undermine,
embarrass, and interfere with Carlson's future business prospects,
which he maintains would constitute another breach of his employment contract.
So that is what he's accusing them of.
I don't know if this is gonna get to a point where they're going to,
if he's actually gonna file a civil lawsuit against Fox.
If he does, I mean, he's gonna have to provide evidence and
he has to make his case.
We'll see how that plays out, but these are some pretty serious accusations.
And it's clear to me that he just wants out of that contract so
he can start this new media venture with Twitter.
>> So I read all the details of all the things that he's accusing Fox of, and
I would summarize it this way.
He's got a fighter's chance.
Meaning, look, he makes an argument that you guys broke the contract because
the leaks that you're doing, maybe it's part of the Dominion settlement.
They say it's definitely not part of the Dominion settlement.
If Tucker's right about that, he's almost definitely gonna get paid, but
Dominion denies it, etc.
But there's four or five different things that he lists where I go, maybe.
And remember, the question there is who broke the contract first?
And so when it's a maybe, what happens next is you go to court.
And eventually, both sides go, this is too expensive to fight and for
one of us to lose, and usually, they settle.
So then what's gonna happen?
Tucker is gonna get the money from Elon Musk, and
then he's probably gonna settle with Fox News and get a big chunk of money.
Maybe he doesn't get the whole 25, 30 that they owe him now, right?
But for the rest of his contract, maybe he only gets 10, 15.
Good enough, he's still gonna get a world of money from Elon Musk anyway, so
he's gonna get to double-dip from Fox News and Elon Musk.
And then the third thing that's gonna happen is now that they're in open
warfare, he's gonna get to hit them over and over and
over again while he's setting up the competitor on Twitter.
And the last part was a clear shot across the bow, too.
They said, if we go forward with the lawsuit,
we're gonna want the PR person at Fox News, Briganti's text messages.
And so did she talk to other people in the media and leak against me?
If she did, that's a breach of contract, we'll see you in court.
Knowing Briganti, she almost certainly did, and
she's not gonna want those text messages out there.
So now Tucker's got a super strong hand, in my opinion, against Fox News, and he's
using some of their tricks against them, and he's got a strong hand at Twitter.
I wish it weren't the case cuz I think I can't stand the guy.
I think not only does he mislead you on air, and we know that definitively.
But now that we've seen the text, I mean,
there's so many telling things there about his racial views.
>> Yeah. >> And
they're actually even worse than what he says on air.
>> We can't stand Tucker, but we also can't stand Fox, so let them fight.
[LAUGH] I mean, whatever, we'll see how it plays out.
But I mean, it's not like my heart goes out to either party in this situation.
>> 100%, and I hope that they tear each other to shreds,
although probably Tucker will win.
But my point is even though we don't like Tucker or Elon Musk or Fox,
our job is to be honest with you, and I think that Tucker played this really well,
of course, you know.
>> It seems like that's the case, and he retreated for two weeks.
Seems like he really thought about what he wanted to do and
what his next move would be, and it seems like he has a strategy that could work.
So again, we'll see how it plays out, the story is still developing, it just broke.
But as we learn more, of course, we'll share it with you.