FauX Newz is exposed

Kinda wish Eoten was still around, I'd like to see this defended just for shits and giggles. Apparently, Fox News is all about that Brand Image.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/17/business/fox-news-dominion-lies/index.html

Fox News has been exposed like never before.

A trove of newly-released text messages and emails have laid bare how the right-wing media giant operated with little regard for fact in the weeks and months following the 2020 presidential election. The correspondence reveals that the network’s senior-most executives and highest-profile hosts chose not to disclose what they believed to be the truth of the election out of fear that that the facts would alienate Fox News’ audience and throw the highly profitable business into ruin.

The messages were contained in a stunning legal filing made public on Thursday as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News, showing the network’s executives and talk hosts privately trashing lies pushed by former President Donald Trump’s camp and his supporters asserting the 2020 election was rigged.

But, despite privately acknowledging the realiity of the situation, the network allowed the lies to take hold on its air, in large part because executives and hosts were terrified that telling its sizable audience the truth would prompt them to tune out.

After the election, an incensed Trump had attacked Fox News and encouraged his followers to switch to Newsmax, a smaller right-wing talk channel that was saturating its airwaves with election denialism.

Trump was enraged that Fox News was the first network to call the critical swing state of Arizona for now-president Joe Biden. And he couldn’t stand that the network, rightfully, declared Biden as the winner of the presidential contest.

In the days and weeks after the presidential contest had been called, Fox News’ audience listened to Trump and rebelled against the channel. Fox News shed a chunk of its audience while Newsmax gained significant viewership.

Behind the scenes, Fox News executives and hosts were in panic. Jay Wallace, the Fox News president, described Newsmax’s surge as “troubling” and said the network needed to be “on war footing.”

Rupert Murdoch, the Fox Corporation chairman, emailed Suzanne Scott, the Fox News chief executive, telling her that Newsmax needed to be “watched.” Murdoch said that he didn’t “want to antagonize Trump further” and stressed to her, “everything at stake here.”

The messages underscore that Fox News did not live up to the basic journalistic principle that news organizations are supposed to deliver the news to viewers, without fear or favor. Instead, the right-wing talk channel engineered its coverage to appeal to its audience which was actively being lied to by Trump and his campaign surrogates.

“Our viewers are good people and they believe [the election fraud claims],” Tucker Carlson acknowledged in one message to Laura Ingraham.

A week after the election had been called, Sean Hannity told Carlson and Ingraham, “In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”

“It’s vandalism,” Carlson responded.

Hannity then discussed the damage a competitor could really do to Fox News, describing it as a potentially “serious problem.”

“That could happen,” Carlson replied.

The hosts were so alarmed by Newsmax’s rise, they were enraged when their colleague, White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, tweeted a mere fact check of Trump’s election lies.

“Please get her fired,” Carlson told Hannity. “Seriously What the f**k? I’m actually shocked. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Hannity said he had already spoken to Scott about the matter. He then proceeded to criticize two of his other colleagues, Fox News host Neil Cavuto and then-Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, both of whom were critical of Trump.

“I’m 3 strikes,” Hannity said. “Wallace s**t debate[.] Election night a disaster[.] Now this BS? Nope. Not gonna fly. Did I mention Cavuto?”

The fear that Fox News’ audience would abandon it for good also appeared to drive programming decisions. In the days following the election, Alex Pfeiffer, a Carlson producer, told the host, “Many viewers were upset tonight that we didn’t cover election fraud …. It’s all our viewers care about right now.”

Carlson said the decision was a “mistake,” adding, “I just hate this s**t.”

Executives at Fox were so worried about their audience protesting the channel that Scott, the network chief executive, even made an overture to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a prominent Fox News advertiser and election conspiracy theorist.

When Lindell appeared on Newsmax and criticized Fox News, executives at Fox News “exchanged worried emails about alienating him,” the legal filing said. The filing added that Scott then sent him a handwritten note along with a gift.

In a statement Thursday night, Fox News argued that the court filing contained cherry-picked quotes lacking context.

“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan,” the network said.

None of this is a surprise to anyone but the folks who are gullible enough to watch Fox news. This is what right wing media is, a nonsensical outage machine run by the super rich whose agenda is to shield themselves from regulation and taxation. There is no news there.

That's just the thing, they didn't stay quite; they amplified what they knew to be lies.

"news" agency saying they need to give their audience what they want to hear or risk losing them; election conspiracy nonsense that they knew to be bullshit.

hope dominion gets a huge fucking settlement

i think people on both sides of the political spectrum see them as liars, but the right just sees it like "that's how the game is played"

literal fake news

@br0kenrabbit: what happened to Eoton?

Not American, don't know too much about Fox News, but having seen clips of their coverage of Ukraine basically willing for them to die and be consumed into Russia, hope the fuckers get sued into oblivion.

@lamprey263: I don't remember any announcement of his intent to leave or anything, but he stopped posting shortly after the 2022 midterm elections. Seems like this happens every major election cycle, one or two posters (usually who's party of choice didn't do well) just stop showing up.

Same as jacunuk before him. They come in and spread propaganda and when their time is done they leave.

@LJS9502_basic: Eoten was a long inactive account that became active as soon as Jacunuk stopped posting. Maybe a coincidence? Shame the troll farm didn't sent a substitute this time. Although Eoten will be difficult to replace, straight up crazy dude. I hope he manages to grab as many washing machines as he can.

Please don't mention Fox News hosts and "exposed" together.... I still have to watch these buffoons.

The saddest thing about this is nothing will change.

The people that care already knew all of this, just lacked actual hard evidence. The people that don't care won't accept it or, as @lamprey263 mentioned, just say "that's how the game is played.

Best we can hope for is that FOX News distances themselves from Trump and MAGA crowd to rebuild some of their credibility, if they care to.

Yeah didn't realize he was gone but now that it was mentioned I haven't seen him on here in a while lol.

Hope an Alex Jones size hammering is in the pipes for Fox. What a cesspit of a “news” channel. Complete propaganda.

Here is a link to the actual documents.

Dominion Docs

I encourage you to read pages 24/25 (labeled as such at page bottom). They are pages 37/38 if you are scrolling thru the whole 192 pages.

This is the section dealing with Sydney Powell, Trump lawyer working with Rudy on filing all the frivolous election fraud claims, being interviewed on Fox about the Dominion voting machine irregularities.

The original source Powell used to smear Dominion is literally batshit crazy. The source believes the wind tells her she is a ghost. She believes Justice Scalia was murdered during a human hunt. She has visions, etc.

I kid you not. These Trump lawyers relied on a single email from a mentally incompetent nut job to smear Dominion. Moreover, the Fox host Maria Bartiromo had the original email and knew the source was insane and let Powell blather on with her conspiracy theory provided by the nutjob. Trust me, read these 2 pages and be amazed.

Fox is dead on this and I will laugh when the penalty is announced. Then on to round 2 with Smartmatics.

It's no different than their thousands of antivax segments, all while they were the first in line to get vaccinated themselves.

I hope that it's not only the 1.6b lawsuit against FOX itself, but that the individual propagandists will get their own special cases on top of that.

Both banned.

Absolutely. Nothing would make me happier than to see Hannity and Carlson get theirs, but they’d probably act the exact same way Jones did; play themselves the poor victims.

Fox News preys on human nature really. People like to say Facts over feelings, but quite frankly the opposite is true. Most of us value feelings over facts, or even things that feel intuitive over what evidence supports. That especially includes people who love to pretend the opposite (Hello Ben Shapiro).

As for some posts later on in this thread. Now I see why I am not getting insulted and ad hominem'ed every time I make threads.

They can act however they want, does not mean that they can't get convicted.

I hope faux is actually destroyed. It is anti-news.

@LJS9502_basic: @kathaariancode: I'm pretty sure Eoten was Jakanuk. I think there was another one briefly, burntbyhellfire or something. Same talking points, writing style, and condescending attitude.

Whoever it was, kinda wish they would come back. Was mostly crazy (and kind of a douche) but made a decent point every once in a while. Besides, there really aren't enough conservative posters left to have much of a debate here.

I often wondered if they were the same person. Problem with conservatives and debating is they just rehash talking points.

What positions are they going to seriously debate at this point? The party mainstream has embraced the lunatic fringe, and their platform reflects that.

I'm still amazed by how gullible republican voters are

Doubt they were. Eoten was a PC/Switch gamer, while Jakanuk was a PS gamer iirc.

Sadly at this point, I fear that political debate is dead. The Populist Right has taken over the mainstream right in the west, and with it, the blatant anti-empiricism. Have you seen Jordan B Petersson's tweets as of late?

The guy is full in on anti-empiricism these days.

Another issue of course is that the right really have nothing to run on but Culture Wars and Identity politics, but everyone else is just so disinterested in the topic.

I could bring up another thread on European political topics. Or I could make a thread promoting Vegan law-making. But really, there isn't really much more room for debate these days due to the lack of good faith conservative rhetoric.

The most annoying thing about goons like Peterson, their entire schtick is based off of lies:

Algorithmic amplification of politics on Twitter | PNAS

We presented a comprehensive audit of algorithmic amplification of political content by the recommender system in Twitter’s home timeline. Across the seven countries we studied, we found that mainstream right-wing parties benefit at least as much, and often substantially more, from algorithmic personalization than their left-wing counterparts.

@Maroxad: I just don't have the energy anymore to keep explaining to my family members that, no, their daughter's classmates are not using a litter box in the classroom because they identify as cats.

"I know they are, it's happening in my daughter's school!"

People are making fools of them for personal gain, and what they're convinced of is so shamelessly false on it's face that it should have, at the very least, instantly given them pause.

And that instinct is just no longer there. They will believe whatever is thrown their way by partisan media, which is by design.

TIL that Newsmax exists, and they terrify Fox News.

Which is a shame. Debates are no longer about learning, it's about making the other person look like a fool. The power of your argument is in how loud you can present it, not what it actually means.

Some of the arguments are so mindboggling stupid.

Referring to the the typical gesturing to imagined hypocrisy?

Yup, and the disregard for any scientific evidence.

Capitalism allows for absurd shit to exist.

New stuff: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/08/media/fox-news-dominion-filings-reliable-sources/index.html

This particularly makes me ill:

The legal filings total hundreds and hundreds of pages. Journalists will unquestionably be sifting through them for days and weeks to come. But here are some immediate takeaways:

► Carlson “passionately” hates Trump: In a number of private text messages, Carlson was harshly critical of Trump. In one November 2020 exchange, Carlson said Trump’s decision to snub Joe Biden’s inauguration was “so destructive.” Carlson added that Trump’s post-election behavior was “disgusting” and that he was “trying to look away.” In another text message conversation, two days before the January 6 attack, Carlson said, “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.” Carlson added of Trump, “I hate him passionately.” The Fox host said of the Trump presidency, “That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”

These people should have their journalistic credentials removed. They should also be mocked. What a bunch of weak-kneed, spineless corporate puppets.

Fox news is a fake network that hired a bunch of actors to peddle the most absurd nonsense to the most gullible people alive.

Pikachu shocked face? 💁🏼‍♀️

You have to remember that a very literal cult controls a major political party in America and that same cult runs Fox News. The cult knows Fox isn’t news and is lying to them. Fox stopped lying temporarily and angered the cult. The lying wasn’t supposed to be recognized publicly.

They seem to think they can just wait for it to blow over and the cult will settle down to listen to more comforting lies.

Carlson added of Trump, “I hate him passionately."

Ew I agree with the permanently constipated man on something. WTF

My father is having a very difficult time and I feel bad for him. Now he is a deSantis guy but he has been watching FOX NEws for almost 10 years now.

Fox got good lawyers.

On a related note, another Trump lawyer, Jenna Ellis, who was part of the Guliani election denial dream team, has now stipulated that everything she said on TV and Twitter regarding election fraud was false/lies. By stipulated, I mean legally, as part of a Colorado state bar hearing into her conduct.

They are dropping like flies.

Meidas Touch Video

I hope none of you hating on right wing media think that left wing media is any better… if so you might as well put a lampshade on your head and stand in the corner of your bedroom..

I'll agree they should all be looked at with an eye of scrutiny.

But only Fox has a 1.6 billion dollar lawsuit against it for lying to everyone.

@br0kenrabbit: You're trusting CNN to do independent analysis of FoxNews?

HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!

Take your pick, everyone is reporting it except Fox News.

Also, it's not an independent analysis. Check your vocabulary, I think you're very confused.

Yeah this is insanity.. I don't get the cognitive dissonance either dabear.

@br0kenrabbit: CNN is the most biased, most corrupt, of all cable news. Given the cesspool that is cable news as a whole, that's saying a lot.

So, yes I stand by my comment.