Speaker 1: Fox News Leaked text messages confirm that while on air, people like Sean HANNITY,
Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham were acting as though there was merit and legitimacy to
Donald Trump's bogus claims that he actually won the 2020 election.
Privately, Fox hosts were texting each other and others and saying, This is nonsense.
We know it's nonsense.
This is a really big disaster.
Fascinating, but not altogether surprising story.
Rolling Stone has an article.
Tucker Carlson Pushes Election Fraud B.S.
Same night filing reveals he knows it's B.S..
Dominion Voting Systems is suing Fox News for spreading conspiracy theories about conspiracies,
about the company's role in non-existent fraud in the 2020 election.
Dominion submitted a bombshell legal filing Thursday revealing that most of the Fox News
host who pushed the big lie knew it was total B.S., as well as the internal strife over
how to cover it.
These text messages are fascinating.
Tucker Carlson was particularly incensed.
The filing reveals, quote, Sidney Powell is lying.
By the way, I caught her.
It's insane.
He texted to Laura Ingraham on November 18th.
Ingraham responded that Sidney Powell is, quote, a complete nut, as is Rudy Giuliani.
Quote, It's unbelievably offensive to me, said Carlson.
Our viewers are good people and they believe it.
Well, then why are you continuing to push that idea on air?
He said.
How did senile hermit Joe Biden get 15 million more votes than his boss rock star crowd surfer
Barack Obama?
Results like that would seem to defy the laws of known physics and qualify instead as a
miracle.
Was the 2020 election a miracle?
Obama.
So what?
So the story here is they knew it was B.S.
They were texting each other, that it was B.S. and yet on air they continued to entertain
this stuff as if it was a serious thing.
Here's an example of Laura Ingraham interviewing Sidney Powell, whom privately she was saying
is a complete nut.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is coup 5.0 and the Department of Justice and the FBI really need
to get after it right now.
Right now, all the reports of fraud, there are hundreds of them.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Hundreds of report of fraud.
Reports of fraud.
That's that's stunning, huh?
Speaker 2: Well, I hope Attorney General Barr is doing that.
Very, very hopeful that he's doing that.
Otherwise, we're in big trouble as a country, especially with the elections going forward.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So there's understand.
Privately, Laura Ingraham is saying Sidney Powell is a nut.
Publicly, Sidney Powell comes on, makes all of these false claims about the election.
And Laura Ingram says if this isn't being investigated, we're in trouble as a country.
Wow.
Openly lying to their audience.
Another example.
Here's actually a good little compilation that CNN did.
Remember, privately, all of these people, all of these people are saying this is nonsense.
Here's what they were saying publicly.
The fix.
Speaker 2: Already.
Speaker 3: In it is a damning indictment of Fox News.
Speaker 2: The outcome of our presidential.
Speaker 1: Election was seized from the hands of voters.
Speaker 3: As a network publicly and repeatedly promoted former President Trump's 2020 election
fraud claims to millions of their viewers.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Up to this election.
Speaker 3: And privately, top anchors and executives mocked 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 texting.
Other Fox News host Sidney Powell is lying.
By the way.
I caught her.
It's insane, he says about Trump's lawyers, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani's unfounded
claims.
Sidney is a complete nut.
No one has worked 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.
Speaker 2: All right.
These election challenges are still going on and disturbing irregularities have been
found and must be investigated.
Speaker 1: Have they really.
Speaker 2: Laura, in it to the fullest?
Speaker 3: On election night, the network first to call Arizona for Biden.
Speaker 2: The Fox News Decision Desk is calling Arizona for Joe Biden.
That is a big get for the Biden campaign as.
Speaker 3: Trump's baseless concern.
Piracy theories started to take hold.
Speaker 2: This is a fraud on the American public.
So we'll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court.
KARL Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, you guys get the picture.
So there's a bunch of different stories here.
Of course there is.
Again, the story that Fox News lies to its audience for profit.
Now, you could say, well, but David, all of these for profit media networks are going
to create content that is profitable.
Yes.
But they don't all brazenly lie.
While behind the scenes the anchors are saying we are telling lies to our audience.
There is actually a difference there.
There are many criticisms of corporate media that can be made that apply to all of these
outlets.
But this sort of brazen lying was not being carried out by every corporate media outlet.
So that's that's one story.
The second story, of course, is that.
Fox News presents itself as news.
But the people I just named HANNITY, Ingram, Tucker Carlson, when the rubber meets the
road and they end up in court universally, Fox News lawyers say these are not news people.
These are entertainers who use hyperbole and exaggeration.
And that's the argument they make when they are confronted with the reality of their lives.
But there is a third story here, and it's about the congressional hearings that are
going on.
We talked about last week and the week before, the weaponization of government hearing.
We talked about the big tech hearings, etc., part of their story.
But let me be clear, not Fox News.
Part of the story from the right has been that media was biased in suppressing news
of the fraud and irregularities.
The Hunter Biden story, criticism of liberals, etc.
This is part of the story that they're telling.
What those hearings, to some degree are trying to do is to retrospectively legitimize and
sort of rehabilitate what networks like Fox News did to come down against Twitter, for
example, for limiting the spread of certain disinformation rather than saying, hey, you
know what, Fox News hosts knew they were spreading lies.
They want to use the hearings to say, forget about the text messages, The Fox News people
and everybody on the right thought they were telling the truth and it was big tech and
whoever else that censored that truth, even though privately we know that they know that
they were telling lies.
So we will see what the outcome is from this lawsuit.
It is a very big deal.
And I will let you know as that happens.
But humiliating if you have a sense of shame, it's not clear that the Fox News hosts do.