Fox News exposed.
Despite new court documents
revealing the biggest names on Fox News,
along with the top executives,
never believed the election was stolen.
They still gave a megaphone
to the conspiracy theory saying it was.
And even as of last night,
Tucker Carlson,
who privately we now
know, said Trump
should concede
and said
that fraud did not impact
the outcome of the election.
Still went out
publicly and fueled the fire
There are so many unanswered questions,
some of them lingering.
How, for example,
did senile hermit Joe Biden
get 15 million
more votes than his former boss?
Rock star crowd.
Sure for Barack
Obama was also like
that would seem to defy
the laws of known physics and qualify
instead as a miracle.
Was the 2020 election a miracle?
Honestly, we don't know.
Sunlen Serfaty
is OUTFRONT
is the fix already in?
It is a damning indictment of Fox News.
The outcome of our presidential
election was seized
from the hands of voters
as a network publicly
and repeatedly promoted
former President Trump's
2020 election fraud claims
to millions of their viewers.
Every American should be angry.
You should be outraged.
You should be worried.
You should be concerned
at what has happened in the election
in the lead up to this election.
And privately,
top anchors and executives
mock Trump's lies
calling them
ludicrous, really crazy stuff
and totally off the rails.
The revelations coming
from hundreds of pages of newly
released evidence in the legal filing
as part of the Dominion
voting systems lawsuit against Fox News.
In this text exchange,
two weeks after the election.
Tucker Carlson texts
in other Fox News hosts.
Sidney Powell is lying, by the way.
I caught her.
It's insane,
he says about Trump's
lawyer, Sidney Powell,
and Rudy Giuliani's unfounded claims.
Sidney is a complete nut.
No one will work with her.
Ditto with Rudy.
Laura Ingraham wrote back.
Tucker responds, It's
unbelievably offensive to me.
Our viewers are good people.
And they believe it.
Even as those
same hosts
went on the air
arguing completely otherwise.
All right.
These election challenges
are still going on
and disturbing
irregularities have been found
and must be investigated to the fullest.
On election
night, the network
first to call Arizona for Biden.
The Fox News
decision desk is calling Arizona
for Joe Biden.
That is a big get for the Biden campaign.
As Trump's baseless conspiracy
theories started to take hold.
This is a fraud on the American public.
So we'll be going to the U.S.
Supreme Court.
Carlson wrote his producer
warning that Trump
could easily destroy us
if we play it wrong.
The court documents
show in a scramble behind the scenes
as viewers
rebelled against Fox
for calling the contest in Biden's favor
in a course correction
internally to prioritize profitability
over the truth.
After Fox
News reporter
Jacki Henrich
fact-checked to Trump tweet
about votes being destroyed,
Tucker Carlson texting his colleagues,
please get her fired.
Seriously, what the F?
It's measurably hurting the company.
The stock price is down.
Fox News in a statement argues
a court filing contains
cherry picked quotes lacking context.
As Fox News host continued this week, to
sow doubt.
Was the 2020 election a miracle?
Honestly, we don't know.
We don't expect to get an answer to it
tonight
in this public versus
private narrative extended
all the way
up to the highest levels
of Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch,
according to court documents
did not believe Trump's election lies
and not only did he say in an email.
Weeks after the election
that the Trump
team's claims
were really crazy stuff and damaging.
But he even floated
the idea of having Tucker
Carlson, Sean
Hannity
and Laura
Ingraham appear together in prime time
to declare Joe Biden
as the rightful winner of the election,
something Aaron
then, of course, never happened.
It didn't
wonder what the world
would have been like had it happened.
Thank you very much, Sunlen.
And I want to go now to Rusty Bowers.
The former
Republican House speaker in Arizona
testified before the January
six committee
about how he fought back
against Trump efforts
to overturn the election.
And he's talked about the threats
to his life and his safety
and his family is faced because of it.
Also up
front, Van Jones, former
special adviser to President Obama
and Russia. I want to speak with you.
Start with you.
It it turns out right, we see this, that
the top anchors
and top executives at Fox
News knew all along
that what you were saying about
the election was true. Right.
They knew what they called
the lies ludicrous.
They said their viewers are good people
and would might believe the lies.
But when they went out publicly,
they gave it oxygen.
They pumped those lies of Trump
that the election was stolen.
What do you say to all this?
Well, it
sure would have helped many in the field
as we attempted to stand up to all this
sooner of of
of the demand for lies.
It's interesting that Fox News would say
we need to tell
gives the news that the viewers want.
It's not what they need or what
the truth that they might.
It might not like.
They might not like.
But this is what they want.
But had had they followed Murdoch's lead
and is that's
when it got down
to fighting it out in the trenches.
We could have at least said, look,
Rupert Murdoch, Fox News has even said,
you know, this is highly questionable.
Even that would have been helpful.
But so, you know,
water on over an old bridge, as it were.
But
it's it's hurt.
It hurts.
I mean, you know, Van, it's interesting.
I remember watching one day, Neil
Cavuto, highly respected
Fox Business anchor,
he cut away from a press conference
with the then-White House press
secretary, Kayleigh McEnany,
because she was pushing
baseless fraud allegations.
And he said,
and I remember it because I thought,
what's going to happen, Neil Cavuto?
He said,
I can't in good countenance continue
to show you this.
And because of the filing,
it says that the brand team
at Fox News, led by Raj Shah, notified
senior Fox News and Fox Corporation
leadership of the brand threat,
as they called it,
that was posed by what Cavuto did.
So then we find that Cavuto was called
a threat to the Fox brand
because he cut away
from a press conference
where someone was lying
about the election.
I mean, that's pretty incredible.
Does Fox offer any consequences
from any of these revelations?
Know, I don't know if they will.
They certainly should.
And by the way, you know,
it's is it now false advertising
to even call them Fox News
This is not news.
This is not how a news
organization functions.
You tell the truth.
You without fear or favor.
That's that's literally our ethics
to tell the truth about fear or favor.
You make a mistake.
You apologize for it.
None is happening.
And you have families
who have been torn apart.
Marriages have been torn apart.
A country that's been torn apart
because of the false advertising.
That is a new this is more like
a professional wrestling
than it is news.
And, you know, Rusty,
you heard Tucker Carlson
last night, right.
Even after the texts come out of him
saying the truth. Right.
He he went out last night
and pumped up the falsehood
and the lies about the election.
Again, calling it a miracle.
You're from Arizona, right?
You've got gubernatorial candidate
there, Carrie Lake, still
falsely saying she won the election.
Right. This is continuing even now.
And we're about to come into
a presidential election cycle
where Trump is running again.
How much damage has Fox
News done on this, Rusty?
Well,
there's all kinds of levels of damages.
There's a
there's literal damage to dominion
and smart tech and others.
Who put together hundreds of contracts
across the country
with counties and states
to provide the machinery
and the technology and the consent it's
to do the job right.
All called in question,
many contracts lost, etc., etc..
So there's there's physical
I should say, monetary damages.
There's physical damages to people, etc.
There's damages to the to
the confidence of the people at large.
And in that,
in all the officials
that they have elected to
support them all these years,
the damage is pervasive.
And even down to the little mom
and pop news groups
that put out their little blogs
and push this stuff
over and over and over,
it just keeps on going.
But it usually starts
starts at the top and then cascades down
down towards them.
All right.
Thank you both very much.
I appreciate it.