Perhaps the least surprising thing to come out of the wealth of text messages and
emails that have been released.
Thanks to this Dominion lawsuit against Fox News is that,
Fox News is news in the same way that like a strawberry pop tart is fruit.
Maybe on the surface, but not once you dig just a little bit.
Here's an example of that, Rupert Murdoch, who's the chairman of Fox News,
sent an email to CEO Suzanne scott back in november of 2020 making clear both what
they actually thought as a company of Donald Trump's claims of election fraud.
But more importantly what they saw their role being in American politics.
So in this email,
Rupert Murdoch told scott to read a Wall Street Journal piece about Newsmax telling
her these people should be watched if skeptically Trump will concede eventually.
And we should concentrate on Georgia helping any way we can.
They go on to say we don't want to antagonize Trump further, but
Giuliani taken with a large grain of salt, everything at stake here.
So there's a lot in that little paragraph.
They're terrified that Newsmax is going to present themselves as more
pure than Fox News, because they're willing to tell more bald faced lies.
They're worried about that.
They're they believe that Rudy Giuliani is a complete moron, but
they're willing to pretend to not believe that on air.
But I think the most important single part there is we should we,
Fox News should concentrate on Georgia and try to help in any way we can.
Help who Rubert?
Help democracy?
Help the citizenry?
Help georgians, no help Herschel Walker to win the race.
That's what it is.
Well, in that case not Herschel Walker.
Yeah, no, Herschel Walker in that particular case.
So yeah, they know it's not, it's not news with a slight bias.
It is a political operation.
It is an extension of the Republican Party designed explicitly to get
Republican candidates elected.
Also to shift the direction of the Republican party long term.
They're willing to meddle in that way too.
But no, they want to get them elected and
they will say what is necessary to make that happen.
And they will not say things that would harm that from happening.
I know that everybody knows that Fox isn't real news.
They've known it for some time, but this is just damning for
a network that some people still think is serious.
They're still treated with a level of respect from places like CNN and
MSNBC that has definitely not been warranted for a very, very long time.
>> So I would put an asterisk on what John said.
Everybody knows that Fox is propaganda except mainstream media.
And today they're all acting super shocked and chagrined.
Like it turns out Fox News might be biased really, you don't say.
And by the way, I've explained why before,
a lot of people that work in cable news used to work at Fox News.
They're not gonna come in and say, yeah, my former employer, who I gladly took tons
of money from, is doing propaganda because it'll ruin their career.
And tons of people in the past wanted to work for Fox News now,
it's become more untenable.
But in the old days, everybody at MSNBC and CNN thought that they might be working
at Fox News one day and they didn't want to bite the hand that might feed them.
So they had a vested financial interest in pretending that
Fox News was doing real news.
Okay, now there's four state things in Murdoch statements that are interesting
admissions.
Everything is at stake, meaning, look if we screw this up either relying on behalf
of Trump and could create legal issues, boom, that's what happened.
But if we don't lie on behalf of Trump,
our entire audience after 25 years of being dominant, they could all walk away.
Tucker says it, Hannity says it and here the big boss says it.
They're all worried to death that if they don't lie to their audience,
they will immediately leave if they don't kiss Trump's ass.
That goes to interesting point number two, he says,
we don't want to antagonize Trump.
Even the legendary Rupert Murdoch who I think has largely been the most
powerful man on earth for the last quarter century is afraid of Donald Trump.
Now we know who the boss is, okay, at Murdoch after all these
years at the end, you heal, let's just keep it real okay.
Number three.
What's also interesting is that after all these years with Donald Trump,
he still didn't know.
All these guys, I mean in Washington there's such a weird bubble.
I know he doesn't live in Washington, but he's part of the powerful and
elite that around Washington.
They just genuinely are surprised every time.
They don't get it.
They keep assuming that he's gonna act like them,
that he has the same interests as them.
Now, in the end we rob everybody together and it's all good and
we pretend that the status quo is great, he'll do that at the end.
No, he won't.
He's a mad man.
You thought he was gonna concede?
Of course he wasn't gonna concede.
Of course he wasn't gonna do anything rational.
Even Murdoch didn't know, I mean,
we're at the last days at that point in November 16th, the elections already done.
We've already seen all the madness that Donald Trump has done and
he still thought he was gonna act rationally.
That's amazing to me.
And then finally, of course, helping any way we can.
But look there,
I'm gonna say something that almost none of the rest of the media says.
If Fox News said, look guys, we're conservatives,
the whole station is conservative.
Our election tabulating forces serving, which by the way, it wasn't to be fair and
that's why they were living right.
They actually did a tiny bit of objective reporting for one nanosecond and
the rest of the building was furious with the election team, right?
But if they said, hey, even our news is from a conservative perspective,
right wing perspective, and we want Republicans to win.
And you know what the crazy, the problem with the happier we are, or
the more extreme, more radical or more right wing, more true,
whatever you want to phrase it, right?
I would have no problem with that.
Everybody's like, no, you can't do that.
No, no, you can do that.
It's a free country.
My problem is that they pretend to be objective news and
the rest of the news media plays along with that game,
which then takes their propaganda and gives it extra weight as if it's real.
As if it's not a perspective, but the actual news and that does great damage.
>> It really does.
And I just think that for Fox News, it's as if they became full of themselves in
dealing with Trump, because they'd always taken on the character of plastic man.
They really had, they could spend their way out of everything,
they could shift, they could pivot, and keep their core audience.
But if they had done just a measure of what you're talking about jake and
just been a little bit real what we all see anyway.
I think they could have kept their core audience.
You can keep your core audience, you don't get sued perhaps, but
that's just not when you kind of twist yourself into a pretzel to do
this song and dance and get that money.
There's nowhere left to go except for the text messages.
And the only thing that really surprises me about all of this, unlike you said,
the mainstream media does anybody at Fox and how to use WhatsApp?
It's like why are they texting and emailing all this stuff?
Just get on WhatsApp and speak freely.
>> [LAUGH] Don't give many hints Sharon,
you remember how much smarter you are than them?
They don't know, [LAUGH] Okay.
>> We can actually give you a bit of an example of the ongoing commitment to that.
Again, like this is sort of just catching people up if you don't already know, but
we can go to Herschel Walker obviously made a lot of appearances on Fox nNews.
38 of them,
including 19 on Hannity including something that was called a town hall.
And again, it's a town hall like Fox is news.
Technically Herschel Walker was there.
His face was on the screen and his body was mostly upright.
He was usually sandwiched between two people who were there to deliver
the actual message.
They were doing everything they could as a network to just carry him across
the finish line.
And thankfully in this case it wasn't enough, but that's what it is.
I do want to give an example though of what John was talking about.
We have a bit of a video, this is Oliver Darcy on CNN responding to
the revelations that have come out over the last 24 hours.
>> So these documents perhaps in some ways,
what they're revealing is not surprising to folks who work in the media,
maybe people in Washington, but maybe revealing for a lot of dedicated viewers.
>> Yeah, I think this, this court filing the messages contained and
it really exposed Fox News as frankly a propaganda machine in search of profit.
I think this shows how void of any journalistic ethics
the people at the top of Fox News were.
They were not caring about, what the right thing to do as a reporter is.
They were caring about not alienating their audience,
they were afraid of the audience and afraid of Donald Trump.
And these messages, they're really quite damning and they reveal it.
>> Yeah, and look, I said on the damage, what I'll say again,
I wish that we lived in a world where there would be 1% of Fox's audience or 10.
Or maybe the 75% that's merited, that would see this sort of thing and think,
well I am never gonna watch Tucker Carlson again.
I can't trust a single thing he says, he openly and
knowingly lies to me for profit.
But that of course isn't going to happen for a variety of reasons.
The viewers are in a bubble.
Most of them are never gonna hear about this story.
Those who hear about it are not gonna hear the substance of it because Fox is just
not going to cover it.
Or if they are, it's gonna be incredibly defensive and
they're going to lie about it.
Tucker will lie about it the same way that he lies about the content of the coup that
he believed was led by a literal demon.
But more importantly,
it's because we can not fall into the trap that I think I fall into constantly.
And I think that maybe a lot of people, on a variety of different positions on
the left fall into which is assuming that a value that we hold is universal.
We do that a lot.
And one of those values is, I want what I believe to accurately reflect reality.
That's not a universal value literally at all.
There's a lot of other reasons to want to be told a thing
besides just that it's true.
They listen to tucker Carlson not because he speaks the truth or
they honestly think that it's true.
They do it because it's really nice.
It is the rhetorical equivalent of your mom softly stroking your head when you
were a child.
They just want to feel better.
They want to feel comfortable, they want to feel superior.
They want to feel moral, they don't care if the person telling them the things that
make them feel that way is a liar or is personally profiting from it.
They love that, they want him to lie.
They want the politicians to lie.
They want them to be vicious and cruel and hypocritical and opportunistic,
because all of that sometimes in reality, but
more often just in their perception is done to help people like them.
And that is way more important to them than the things they believe being
grounded in reality.
>> All right, so let me see two important things here.
One is a contrast to how you can do it, right?
So here, I'll give us as an example and we let you be the judge for yourself.
So, where does a similar situation with Bernie in the primaries in 2016.
So we told you guys, Hey listen,
the Democrats only did six debates on the Republicans did like nearly 30.
They're obviously limiting the debate.
So that Hillary Clinton who's the favorite, will have an advantage and
Bernie Sanders won't have much oxygen, right?
That won't get as much media coverage.
They put them on the nights that football was on.
They try to minimize the number of people watching those debates as much as
possible.
They then did what is in effect money laundering through the DNC where
Hillary Clinton donors could would get the money back to Hillary in other ways.
I mean it's just outrageous.
But when people said no, they fixed the votes themselves and
Bernie was cheated and the votes were rigged.
We said on this network, no, we don't see persuasive evidence of that.
Now, you think our side was happy about that?
No, there was a lot of people who were mad about that, and they're like, no,
I want you to say it's true.
>> And other people who would willingly tell that lie.
>> Yeah, and tons of other people were okay with that.
We were not okay with it because it wasn't true.
So you actually can do the right thing, even if it pisses off your audience.
I know that for not just for right wing news, but for
a lot of mainstream media that seems inconceivable.
What if we tell the truth about, but then all the elites who love him so
much will be mad at us.
No, no, let's pretend that he just can't possibly regulate,
even though he's a regulator in charge transportation, right?
And so we don't do sweet little lies here.
And in fact, they would never like newsmax gonna call out is like,
is daily wire and bench bureau and crowd are gonna call out Fox News?
They're not gonna call out Fox News,
because they did the same exact lies themselves, right?
Whereas we looked at one of our a politician on our side at the time,
Tulsi Gabbart and before anyone knew it and before and when we said.
We told you, Josie Aber is not telling you the truth,
there's something wrong with her, right.
And we explained why and we gave you the evidence and
people were furious on our side.
How dare you?
She's such a great progressive etcetera.
Well, it turns out we were right, you know why we tell you that?
Because our job is news, it's not to stroke your hair like they do on Fox News.
And I can go on and on with also calling out members of so
called left wing media etcetera.
And now back to Fox News, guys, they've been doing this throughout history.
So the Murdoch quotes are of course about David Perdue and
kelly Loeffler back in 2020.
But they did the same thing for Herschel Walker as we showed you in 2022, why?
Because they wanted the Republicans hold the Senate both times and both times they
went through Georgia because of the runoff system that they have.
And it goes all the way back to Roger Ailes hiring George W Bush's
cousin to be their election tabulator back then.
Back when Ailes was alive, they cheated all the way through and
they did it more effectively.
And when everybody was in a panic in the middle of 2000 election, all the networks,
and they had called it for gore and then they took it back and
they didn't know what to do.
Ailes thought this is an opportunity.
So he's the guy who built Fox News and ran Fox news for a long time.
And George Bush's cousin decided that George Bush had definitively won Florida.
Now, even in their own tabulation was 537 votes out of tens of millions of votes.
It's it's absurd.
Of course that's not statistically relevant.
There's no way that Bush had won.
They just decided Bush's cousin and Ailes.
Let's just lot.
Let's just make it up and say that Bush won.
And if we say it strong enough,
I bet you the other idiots in mainstream media will panic.
No Fox called it first, right?
And that's exactly what happened.
And by the way, when the news outlets tabulated
the votes after the Supreme Court decision handing the election to Bush,
Gore had actually won florida.
He actually had won, not only the popular vote but the Electoral College,
but Fox News's dirty trick 100% work back then.
And the power of that trick was that the rest of the media believed in
the fiction that they were doing news.
Can we please put an end to that now that we know it definitively?
>> We'll see.
I think you can tell the truth and viewers can get pissed at you and
they'll come back if you want to be happy, you wanna feel good.
I can smoke a fat blunt and have that okay.
Not saying I partake but this whole thing is, you're right, that was that moment.
And the mainstream media didn't just bite, they relish.
They reported on, remember the phone calls back and forth,
where Gore had to take it back.
And then W said, well my brother said that I won and the whole thing was
just this whole soap opera scene orchestrated by Roger Ailes and and
everything else he was up to.
And here we are today, living still some form of it,
a worse form of it perhaps where people every day in the middle of the country and
all over, they don't really know what reality is.
They really don't know what it is.
They actually believe it.
They consume it and they smoke it to the end.
>> I like that you brought that back to the smoking, I think Friday night.
>> That's a good point.